Lille Airport: an ideal gateway for the North of France and the Belgian provinces East & West Flanders and Hainaut

At the Brussels Holiday Fair 2022, Aviation24.be had an exclusive interview with Edouard Aulanier (Lille Airport), Florence Bruyère (TUI fly Belgium) and Chloé Saucin (Interel) about the attractiveness of Lille Airport for French, but also Belgian travellers. The new summer schedule for the airport has been presented with 50 destinations served by 10 airlines.

A. Lille Airport: location and accessibility

Lille Airport enjoys an ideal location in Lesquin to the south of the Lille metropolitan area which offers it remarkable accessibility, 15 minutes from Lille city centre and served by 4 motorways (A1, A23, A25, A27) and several bus lines.

Its accessibility now makes it also a natural airport for many Belgian travellers from neighbouring Hainaut but also from East Flanders and West Flanders.

B. A few figures

Lille Airport recorded traffic of 1,167,042 passengers in 2021.

In this year of post-Covid recovery, several times disrupted by the evolution of the health crisis, commercial traffic recorded an increase of 59% compared to 2020; it nevertheless remains 47% below the record traffic recorded in 2019 (2.2 million passengers). Around 30% of the passengers currently travel for business.

In a changing context, the airlines present in Lille have demonstrated their responsiveness, first and foremost the low-cost airlines, whose traffic represented nearly 79% of the overall traffic.

In 2021, easyJet and Volotea were the first two airlines in terms of passenger volumes passing through Lille Airport, ahead of the Air France group companies (Air France and Transavia France), Ryanair and TUI fly.

C. Airlines present at Lille Airport

Lille Airport welcomes 10 scheduled airlines operating year-round or seasonal flights:

• AIRFRANCE: year-round flights to the Lyon hub, with multiple connections to regional French airports and Europe; seasonal flights to Corsica (Ajaccio, Bastia, Calvi, Figari) and Biarritz between April and October
• AIR ALGERIE: year-round flights to Algiers
• Binter Canarias: year-round flights to Gran Canaria
• easyJet: year-round flights to Bordeaux, Nantes, Nice, Toulouse, Geneva. From 1 May 2022, flights to Palma de Mallorca
• nouvelair: Flights to Djerba, Tunis, Monastir from February to October
• RYANAIR: year-round flights to Marseille, Porto, Krakow
• sky express: Flights to Heraklion from April to October
• Transavia: year-round flights to Marseille
• TUI fly: year-round flights to 7 cities in Morocco; seasonal flights to 12 other destinations in the Mediterranean (the Canary Islands, Balearic Islands, Greece, Portugal, etc.)(see separate article)
• VOLOTEA: On Friday 1 April 2022, Volotea will inaugurate its new French operational base in Lille. Volotea will serve a total of 15 destinations to France, the Balearic Islands, Croatia, Sicily, Bulgaria… and will offer nearly 300,000 seats on departure from Lille.

D. Destinations served

In this year 2022, 50 destinations will be served from Lille Airport, towards
metropolitan France, Corsica, the Mediterranean, Egypt, the Canary Islands, Poland,
Among the novelties of the Summer 2022 season which begins this weekend of March 27:

• Calvi, Palermo, Cagliari, Split, Varna, served by Volotea from May
• Palma de Mallorca, served by easyJet from 1 May
• Marseille, served by Transavia France from 27 March
• Heraklion, served by the Greek company SKY express from 10 April
• Krakow, now served by Ryanair
• Seven cities in Morocco (Agadir, Casablanca, Fez, Marrakech, Nador, Oujda and Tangier) are once again accessible thanks to TUI fly, since the reopening of the kingdom to international flights in early February

Corsica will again be well served: the 4 airports of the Island of Beauty will indeed be accessible from Lille thanks to the numerous flights offered each week by the companies Air France and Volotea.

Finally, destinations such as Turkey (Izmir and Bodrum with Corendon on behalf of tour operators FTI Voyages and Mondial Tourisme) and Egypt (Hurghada) are making a comeback in 2022.

E. A diversified and inexpensive parking offer

For the summer season which begins this weekend at the end of March, Lille Airport has supervised car parks, configured to offer travellers different parking options:
• Park P1: short stay/weekend formula
• P6 Long Term Park: very economical formulas
• P4: covered park

Parking is accessible with or without prior reservation on its remote park and its covered park. Most car parks are in contact with the terminal, for optimal ease; the remote park has a free bus transfer service, on request.

All the prices can be consulted on www.lille.aeroport.fr/parkings/