Europe’s Small Airports Face Challenges

PARIS — For the first time in 16 years as managing director of Linz Airport in northern Austria, Gerhard Kunesch teamed up recently with his local chamber of commerce for help in securing new business.

Normally Mr. Kunesch deals one-to-one with potential partners, approaching airline executives with offers and pitches. But after years of declining passenger numbers in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis, he decided he needed to try another tack.

Apparently, it worked: Five flights a day now depart from Linz for Vienna, instead of three.

“We are a very small airport,” Mr. Kunesch said in an interview. “We realized that we had to build partnerships and form alliances.”

Now, the success of that approach is redefining Linz Airport’s marketing strategy. Mr. Kunesch said he planned to hire a new employee in August to act as a liaison between the airport and the partnerships that he hopes to develop with tourism operators and local government offices. Together, these organizations can pool their resources and focus jointly on business development.

Linz is not alone in trying new tactics. Europe’s small airports, those serving five million passengers a year or fewer, are facing huge challenges.

With European economies flat-lining in the aftermath of the financial crisis, small airports have struggled to grow, and many are still losing passengers.

On average, their passenger traffic has grown just 1.6 percent a year since 2008, compared with an industry average of 7.3 percent; last year 45 percent of small airports actually lost traffic, according to a presentation given at a regional airports conference in Lyon in April.

Now, they are responding. “The airports used to sit and wait for the airlines to come to them,” said Olivier Jankovec, director general of Airports Council International Europe, a group that represents more than 450 airports in 44 European countries. “But this is no longer the case. You have to go out and lure the airlines to come to serve your destination.”

ACI Europe represents airports of all sizes, from the largest, like London Heathrow, to the smallest, like Linz. Together they handle 90 percent of commercial air traffic in Europe — over 1.5 billion passengers, 18 million tons of freight and more than 20 million aircraft movements each year. Out of this vast traffic, about 400 small airports together account for more than a third of the Continent’s passenger traffic, ACI Europe says.

Yet more than half of these airports are operating at a loss, the group says.

Perhaps the biggest cause of economic instability for small airports is their volatile relationship with low-cost carriers.

Small airports lack the capacity to serve more than a handful of airlines, so they often become highly dependent on those few for revenue. The carriers, however, are under no obligation to guarantee their business. That can leave airports like Glasgow Prestwick, in Scotland, in the greater Glasgow urban area, financially vulnerable. Since Wizz Air pulled out in March, the airport’s sole source of commercial business has been Ryanair.

Still, while their small size creates greater economic pressures for these airports, it also allows for more innovative approaches to recovery. Often, just a handful of people can decide to employ new strategies, like introducing a social media campaign, without having to gain the approval of an entire board or go through a lengthy review process.

“Working at a certain scale allows the company to be more nimble,” Robert O’Meara, director of media and communication at ACI Europe, said in an e-mail. A small airport, he said, “can respond quicker to challenges and opportunities, and experiment a bit in the way it promotes itself.”

New marketing tactics often aim directly at the passenger rather than the airline. Many airports, like Krakow Airport, in Poland, work to foster customers’ loyalty through reward programs offering prizes for frequent visitors, like free or discounted parking.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/17/business/global/europes-small-airports-face-challenges.html?partner=rss&emc=rss