With 2.3 million passengers in 2020, traffic at Bordeaux Airport was down by 70.6% on 2019, as a result of the health crisis and successive travel restrictions imposed since last March. The airport had no fewer than 56 days without any commercial passenger flights.
Quite logically, international traffic was hardest hit with a decline of 76.5% to 1,082,000 registered passengers. The major intercontinental hubs were severely affected by the crisis and performed poorly: Amsterdam (-67.4%), Barcelona (-85.2%), Lisbon (-73.4%), Madrid (-78.5%) and Zurich (-86%).
Flights to the four London airports served from Bordeaux, which had totalled more than 524,000 passengers last year, collapsed by almost 81% (101,000 passengers), despite the excellent news that British Airways was opening services to and from its Heathrow intercontinental hub from last summer.
Scheduled connections to Brussels South Charleroi, Geneva, Basel, Marrakesh and Fez were the only destinations to post above-average results.
In addition, some tourist destinations such as Granada, Fuerteventura, Mykonos, Porto, Prague, Tenerife or Vienna, experienced a smaller decline.
Domestic flights were also affected, but to a lesser extent. With a decrease of “only” 61.9%, domestic traffic accounted for 1,171,000 passengers and moved back ahead of international traffic for the first time since 2016.
Paris was the airport’s leading destination and ended the year on 400,150 passengers transported, down 67% on 2019. Of course, the impact of the shutdown of Air France’s La Navette Paris-Orly shuttle service (566,000 passengers in 2019), a result of the aid granted to the national airline, and Air France’s termination of its flights between Bordeaux and Lille, profoundly affected the traffic results of Bordeaux Airport.
The results for the main domestic routes, such as those of Lyon, Marseille, Nice and Strasbourg, were in line with the general trend, with decreases of between 53% and 66%. In addition, it is important to note that despite the situation, destinations such as Corsica were in higher demand last summer. The routes to the island (Ajaccio, Bastia, Calvi, Figari) taken as a whole were down by only 30% compared to 2019.
After the end of the first lockdown last May, and again at the end of the year during the festive season, easing of the national guidelines allowed a certain level of activity to be restored. During the peak of these periods, almost 60% of the 2019 network of routes from Bordeaux was operated. It is an excellent result and proof that the airline companies were willing to reopen their lines as quickly as possible once the conditions allowed.
easyJet becomes the airport’s leading airline in terms of passenger numbers (740,000), followed by Air France/KLM (682,000), Ryanair (400,000) and Volotea (194,000). Among the scheduled airlines, Air Arabia held up the best, with its traffic dropping by only 38%, followed by KLM with its route to its Amsterdam “hub” (-62%) and Royal Air Maroc to Casablanca (-63%).
In view of the above, traffic at Bordeaux Airport became largely “low cost” in 2020. The low-cost airlines accounted for 62% of the airport’s overall traffic.
In terms of aircraft movements, the results were in line with the traffic figures. In 2020, 23,318 commercial aircraft movements were recorded at Bordeaux-Mérignac airport, a decrease of 65.1%, from 66,794 flights in 2019.
Nevertheless, as some business aviation operations made up for some of the shortfall in scheduled services and, at the same time, industrial activity was relatively strong, the total number of aircraft movements was down by only 53.9%, or 38,840 flights against the total figure of 84,331 in 2019.