Ask anyone in the travel, hospitality or aviation industries about the Covid pandemic and its effects and you can almost see a shadow passing behind their eyes. Few want to talk about it, none want to remember it but sometimes it’s a subject that can’t be avoided.
Katy Best, Belfast City Airport’s Chief Commercial Officer, agrees with her boss, Airport Chief Executive Matthew Hall, when he says that the pandemic was a huge cloud that produced something of a golden lining for the business.
“It’s difficult to see how we could have changed so fundamentally without a catalyst like Covid,” says Katy. “Before the pandemic, we were in a static situation, we were far too reliant on one big operation (the old Flybe) and we needed to change things. In a lot of ways, Covid provided the clean sheet that we needed. We were able to rebuild rather than just recover.”
Belfast City Airport today has a much broader, more appealing and more customer-friendly offering. Aer Lingus Regional (operated by Emerald Airlines) have picked up the network of short-haul non-jet routes to the likes of Manchester, Birmingham, Glasgow and Edinburgh (to name but a few of their 12 routes out of the City). British Airways and BA CityFlyer serve the all-important London Heathrow route along with a popular service to and from London City Airport, and relative newcomers easyJet have expanded rapidly in the past three years to serve London Gatwick, Luton, Manchester, Liverpool, Bristol and Glasgow. They also added sunshine routes to both Palma and Alicante over the summer months.
“This was the fastest growing easyJet airport in 2023,” Katy points out. “Given that easyJet only came here with one route back in 2021, that’s quite an achievement. What’s more, they’ve built a route network which is complimentary to Aer Lingus. There is very little crossover.”
Scottish airline Loganair also links Belfast City with both Inverness and Aberdeen.
But one of the airport’s jewels in the crown is its pair of direct flight into Europe. “We’re the only airport in Northern Ireland with hub connectivity.
In addition to the British Airways Heathrow connection, we’re also able to offer regular, direct flights to big European hubs through our KLM service to Amsterdam Schiphol and the Lufthansa service to Frankfurt,” says Katy. “And we were delighted to announce just last month that the KLM Amsterdam service would be going twice daily from the winter.
“Routes like those will help us to grow our passenger numbers, as well as to claw back some of the Northern Ireland passengers who travel internationally via Dublin Airport.”
In and around the airport itself, things have also been changing. The big project of the past year has been the development of the new Aspire Business Lounge, a much larger lounge facility for passengers travelling through the airport.
But it’s not the only new development. A larger Caffe Nero offering recently opened in the departures area, a Starbucks outlet has also been refurbished and a brand new restaurant operator (new to Northern Ireland) is scheduled to open within the coming months at Belfast City.
Outdoors, meanwhile, the airport’s car parking and passenger drop-off/pick-up areas have also been re-engineered.
“We always work hard to consider the entire passenger journey, from arriving at the airport by road through to boarding the aircraft,” she says. “And the same in reverse for arriving passengers. Our team takes a lot of pride in what it does.”
Belfast City Airport launched a new marketing campaign this summer, focussing firmly on the airport’s speed, ease of use, as well as its location so close to Belfast city centre, all key factors which work in the airport’s favour.
“Our overall passenger numbers are back to the pre-Covid levels of 2019, whilst business travel is also growing steadily, and that’s also very encouraging. The prophets of doom who predicted the end of business travel seem to have got it wrong,” she smiles.
Part of Katy Best’s remit is to maximise the commercial opportunities around the airport, and few would argue that she and her commercial team haven’t done well on that front, from branding around the airport approach through to brand takeovers on various part of the passenger journey.
So what are Katy’s priorities for the year ahead?
“We’d like to keep developing the depth of our schedule. The doubling of daily services to Amsterdam is great news, but we’re confident that we can continue to build in that vein,” she says.
“We added more sunshine routes this summer. The easyJet routes were joined by services from Travel Solutions, from Tui and by charters bringing Royal Caribbean passengers to their cruise departure posts. That’s another area was can continue to develop.
“And we will continue to contribute to the local economy. We reckon that we deliver £400 million GVA to the Belfast economy, even more to Northern Ireland as a whole. And we’re responsible, directly and indirectly, for around 6,000 jobs. That’s a big economic contribution and it will only get bigger.
“Finally, we’ll be continuing on our sustainability journey. We’ve made a lot of progress across the board, but we’ve got a long way still to go. It’s something we’re really committed to.”