4 EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: MATTHEW HALL IT’S IN THE BLOOD
Matthew Hall, CEO, Belfast City Airport sits down with NI Travel News to talk about how it felt to take over the reigns of George Best City Airport during a pandemic, how the airport has coped with the post-pandemic recovery and plans for the future...
BY KIRSTY JOHNSTON
kirsty@nitravelnews.com
WITH a background in aviation, technology and distribution and 30 years of experience in the travel industry behind him, Matthew Hall is the new man at the helm of Belfast City Airport
“It’s in the blood,” says Matthew. “We were in the middle of a pandemic when I took over this role and like a lot of businesses during that time, City was struggling. However, it had proved itself to be resilient and had great potential to emerge and recover so I felt that from a business management perspective that was a great challenge.”
Matthew was right and today Belfast City Airport is in better shape than ever, however he is a perfectionist, always striving to better the customer experience.
“The airport is a great proposition today in terms of how close it is to the city centre - only five minutes, - and how quick it is getting through security - six minutes or less. It’s a winning proposition, but one that I feel can always be improved. You put all that together and it was an exciting opportunity and I’m very much enjoying it
“We are in a pretty good place, considering where we’ve been. Every business, everybody, has been challenged by the pandemic and our industry as a whole has has still got significant challenges, but we are doing okay. We’re now at about 70% of pre-pandemic volumes, a little bit above actually, and by the end of this year we will be north of 100% of 2019 volumes.” That milestone will mark a full recovery for
City Airport says Matthew, while affirming that he wants to make sure
the airport
continues to manage that growth responsibly. “We want to manage that growth responsibility as we have successfully managed the operations thus far, especially through the key busy periods like Easter and July. It was essential that things continued to run smoothly and we have had excellent feedback from customers. It is also important that we continue to deliver the proposition which we feel people enjoy and which we have maintained so far.”
With he removal of travel regulations and
the pandemic slowly fading to the back of people’s minds, Matthew says City Airport is quite different now to how it was pre- pandemic. “We are quite a different airport now,” he says. “Even though we are nearly recovered we are quite a different airport now than we were pre pandemic. So pre-pandemic we had one big airline customer in Flybe, in volume terms they accounted for 80% of our volume. Today we’ve got nine airline customers with a far more balanced portfolio which ultimately for passengers and customers gives them more choice, flexibility and value.”
And Belfast City are proving that they continue to be the airport of choice for passengers looking for great connectivity and flexibility with 70% of passengers choosing to fly on the London or regional routes. “In terms of the route network, when you look at the total passenger volumes to and from Northern Ireland, about 70% of it is either London or the regional airports - Birmingham, Manchester etc,” Matthew continued. “So that has been our core focus so far. We’ve added back all of that network and
we’ve retained all of the routes with reduced frequencies during the pandemic period. Adding back that network and connectivity for Northern Ireland is key. Adding frequencies so people have got more choice and flexibility is key. By the peak week over the summer we had 15 flights a day to London, five or so a day to Manchester and Birmingham. We had 21 destinations in total, 19 of them domestic. “The largest portion of our passenger traffic is point to point, visiting family and friends, domestic holidays and business travel. It’s a combination of all those things. Connectivity through major hubs like Heathrow and Amsterdam is also very important for our passengers. We are good at connecting people and beyond. Our recovery has been good and in terms of our portfolio we have a good blend of carriers now. In addition to the traditional bases of Heathrow with British Airways, Aer Lingus, BA City Flyer and easyJet on Gatwick twice a day. easyJet have also started to services to Liverpool and Bristol so that’s a really good balance. Aer Lingus Regional are continuing to recover and grow, so they will be up to eight destinations with the addition of Southampton and Cardiff. New Flybe, they have formed a base here as have Aer Lingus Regional and they now have ten destinations. We think in terms of serving the needs of the bulk of the market - 70% of the market - that’s key.”
Looking to the future, Matthew says the airport will continue to focus on its core business, keeping the passenger experience key to its core ethos.
“The fastest growing part of the market here is international in terms of point to point, sunshine routes, and we will be looking at that over the course of time. We are prioritising our growth.
“There is the possibility that we will pursue
that growth with other airlines, but the priority at the minute is to get good year round service in all the core, high frequency routes. Some of our existing airline customers have already put on some summer routes such as Barcelona.”
What sets Belfast City Airport apart? “Its proximity,” says Matthew. “Where we
are located from the city centre - five minutes - and we spend a lot of energy to make sure that the necessary obstacles that people have to go through to travel run as smoothly as possible. Thanks to that graduated return to capacity we have managed our staffing well alongside that. We have also added 22 temporary positions to the security process so before people are going through we are reminding them to take their fluids and laptops out to try and help everything run as smoothly as possible.
“At the end of the day, no one really wants to go to an airport, they want to get through an airport. We want to make that experience as smooth as possible for them and once people get airside we want to give them as good a range of facility choice as possible. We have just added an additional pizza Italian restaurant upstairs airside. We have also just opened a brand new double storey cafe Nero landslide and we will shortly be adding an additional coffee outlet airside as well. You never sell enough coffee, people always want coffee! “We are also looking at other things as well. When we look a little bit further out there’s a lot of convince based services that we can provide our passengers whether they are arriving or departing. We’ve got to get the
Sept/Oct 2022 Travel News
key stuff done, but in addition we are always thinking what other services and products can we make available to our customers to make alike a little bit easy. I think access to those things is key.”
Belfast City Airport is committed to
net zero by 2050 and the airport is the first airport in Northern Ireland to sign up to the Airport Carbon Accredited programme. “We were awarded platinum status last year in terms of environmental assessments overall,”
says Matthew. “100% of our
electricity is renewable now. Clearly there’s more to do, we want to do the right thing. We are in the process of prioritising things that we need to do over the coming years to make sure that we are as ahead of the game as we possibly can be. We recognise that there’s a trade off there and we recognise that connectivity on an island is key, but we want to provide the responsible choice from the way we operate in terms of sustainability.” Matthew is also a very strong advocate for the removal of APD, something that has blighted the NI aviation sector for many years.
“I would like to see APD completely gone,” he says. “The reduction was a good step, but not a full step. It will help. I think carriers are being a bit more proactive in their capacity planning on the back of that, but we still consider it an uneven playing field in that respect. We understand that there’s balance and trade off in those decisions but certainly, we feel that we are on a 50% uneven planing field as opposed to 100% previously.” Matthew recognises the challenges faced by most businesses during the pandemic and praised the airport and his staff for keeping everything running as smoothly as possible. He also encourages anyone thinking of a career in the travel industry to go for it! “Every
a blend of new experience with the really loyal experienced operators that we’ve got in business today. I would encourage anyone to get into the travel industry. The future is pretty bright.”
With regards to the runway extension, put on the back burner a few years ago, Matthew says that he has no plans to push forward with any extension to the runway. “We have no immediate plans to look at the runway extension again. There is significant pent up demand for the market that we can serve today. That market is going to grow. By our estimate there’s about 9-10 million passengers in and out of NI from 2019. We’ve had studies done that suggests that’s going to rise by about 16 million by the late 2020s. But to facilitate that we don’t need a lot of runway. We will need to cope with that demand in certain ways, but not with an extended runway.”
Matthew says his new role has been made all the easier as he truly believes in the customer experience the airport is delivering.
“I genuinely believe that we deliver a good proposition here,” he says. “I travel all the time, for one reason of another, and at the moment we are all part of the same industry so i regret that there are challenges out there but by comparison what you get here is pretty good in terms of how close we are and convenient and smooth in and out and I think that is the bedrock to our business. At the moment I think that makes us stand out from the crowd and that’s key for us. We are spending a lot of time making sure that we continue to deliver what we promise and focus on how we can improve it moving forward and making sure the whole team are all behind the same delivery of that proposition.
business has been challenged through the pandemic, some got a little more coverage than others, some things are more emotive than others, but as a career the travel industry is incredibly broad, whether is operational oles, commercial roles. You look at the myriad of travel suppliers that are out there, whether its airports, airlines, hotels, rail etc, in a sustainable way, people are still going to need to be connected over the course of time and I think the industry is going to remain really dynamic and I hope it continues to attract good talent. We are seeing that here at the airport with new fresh faces, which is great. It gives us
“We’ve been shocked and delighted at the amount of people who have taken the time to praise how quick and smooth our security process is. In terms of the destinations and connectivity we have we are up there with Belfast International and not too far off Dublin either. Just because we are a small airport doesn’t mean we don’t have the connectivity and the frequency that people need. Lots of people probably don’t realise that we fly 15 times daily to London or just how frequent our connections are. I think we’ve got a good story to tell and we will continue to keep working on it.”
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