Making its mark
Passengers will soon be experiencing a new look Gatwick.
Oliver Clark talks to Gatwick Airport CEO, Stewart Wingate, about his plans to capture a larger share of the long-haul airline market.
T
alk about a turnaround. At last year’s World Routes in Beijing, London Gatwick Airport was part of BAA’s family of UK airports, all
vying for the attention of airlines at an event where innovation and a compelling product are crucial.
This year the airport, headed by new CEO Stewart Wingate, was ready to step out of Heathrow’s shadow to make its mark. It did so with a massive Hosted Networking Stand emblazoned with new branding, displays by zero-gravity artists and a new long-haul airline incentive programme. “When we met carriers at World Routes, we explained we wanted to share the risks of starting new routes – that’s something we’ve never done before,” Wingate explained to Routes News in Vancouver as he outlined the airport’s strategy. “We brought a senior team to Routes
this year, including a couple of shareholders as we wanted to demonstrate the opportunities at Gatwick,” he explained.
www.routesonline.com
Airline incentive programme The airport offers carriers with a new route, or expanded services on an existing route of six hours or more, a 50% reduction on its parking, landing and passenger charges as marketing support. This reduction drops to 30% in year two and 15% in the third year.
The new programme could not have come a moment sooner. Immediately after its sale, Gatwick had been hemorrhaging US long-haul services at a rate of between 20%–30% per month, as a consequence of the US-UK Open Skies agreement, which saw carriers moving transatlantic services to Heathrow. “Open Skies saw some consolidation at Heathrow, and our prediction is that some of this will come back to Gatwick in the coming few years,” asserts an upbeat Wingate.
The gateway is already faring better, with long-haul routes, excluding North America, growing 10.4% in May, 6.2% in June and
9% in July. In August, Gatwick recorded its best result since the takeover with a 11.3% traffi c increase, while the North Atlantic route losses stabilised.
Recent successes include new routes to North Africa with an easyJet service to Agadir, Morocco; a weekly Thomson service to Monastir, Tunisia; a Tunis Air weekly fl ight to Enfi dha; and several new services to the Dominican Republic, including a BA service to Punta Cana and a weekly service to La Romana courtesy of Thomson. While it is diffi cult to judge the extent to which the incentive scheme is contributing to this, Wingate and his team were negotiating hard at Routes, targeting US carriers, among others, and offering what he believes are compelling reasons to base new services at the UK’s second busiest airport.
Airline relationships “We’ve spoken to about 50 airlines so far, we have a variety of ways of building relationships
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