Fog and snow accounted for the loss of 150,000 passengers at BAA airports last month.
The company’s six UK airports handled eight million passengers in December, down 0.9% on last year.
Passengers at airports across Europe and North America were affected by cancellations and disruption arising from fog and snow, BAA said.
December’s results took the total for BAA’s UK airports in 2009 to 106.9 million, down 4.2% on 2008. The rate of decline slowed to 1.2% in the fourth quarter.
The company’s annual passenger figures for 2009:
– Heathrow down 1.5% on 2008, to 65.9 million.
– Stansted down 10.7%, to 20.0 million.
– Southampton down 8.2% to 1.8 million.
– Edinburgh up 0.6% to 9.0 million.
– Glasgow down 11.3% to 7.2 million.
– Aberdeen down 9.4% to 3.0 million.
BAA chief executive Colin Matthews said: “2009 was a difficult year for our airline customers.
“Towards the end of the year, we saw signs of improvements, particularly at Heathrow, but there are more challenging times ahead in 2010.”
December saw Heathrow record a 1.2% increase in passengers, driven primarily by an increase in European scheduled traffic and long-haul routes to Asia, Africa and Australia.
Stansted dropped 2.6% in December, the best performance since March 2008.
Scottish airports were impacted by the collapse of Flyglobespan, as well as by the weather. Glasgow was down 8.8%, Edinburgh down 4.4%, Aberdeen down 9.4% against the same month the previous year.
Southampton’s passenger figures declined 5.9% in December.
But all major markets suffered from the bad weather in the month, BAA said. Domestic traffic was down 6.5% on last year but European scheduled traffic was up 1.6%.
Key North Atlantic traffic was down 5.7% while other long-haul routes were up 3.5%.
In total, the number of air transport movements at BAA’s UK airports fell by 3.9% in comparison with December 2008 with the result that the figure for the year as a whole (935,000) was 6.5% down on 2008.
by Phil Davies
