ARCHIVED - Corvera airport awaiting the return of British holidaymakers

Far fewer UK flights scheduled at Corvera than in previous years even after Freedom Day in the UK!

After many months of almost total inactivity the terminal building at the Region of Murcia International Airport is beginning to welcome back larger numbers of passengers, but there is still a noticeable shortage of the flights to and from the UK which in the past have dominated the arrivals and departures boards both at Corvera and, prior to 2019, at Murcia-San Javier airport.

90 flights are scheduled to take off and land at Corvera this week, including those on seven domestic routes and travelling between the Costa Cálida and Oujda and Casablanca in Morocco, and high occupancy rates are reported on all of these routes. But traffic to and from the UK remains minimal and with aircraft reported to be barely half full: Ryanair are offer services only to and from Manchester, Brimingham, Bournemouth and Glasgow, while Easyjet’s offer is limited to Bristol and Gatwick flights.

At the same time, Tui are flying into Murcia from airports in Belgium and there are charter flights to and from the Czech Republic, but the 90 flights anticipated this week are far fewer than the 250 or so per week in June 2019, before the pandemic began.

During that month, 133,000 passengers passed through the terminal building, 104,000 of them on UK flights and another 10,000 travelling to and from Ireland. This June, on the other hand, there were only 5,000 passengers on UK flights and 15,000 all told, with no flights scheduled between Corvera and Ireland: click here for a more detailed analysis of passenger numbers during the month.

Despite these data the regional government of Murcia remains outwardly optimistic about the future of the airport and fingers are crossed that after “Freedom Day” on Monday in the UK droves of UK tourists will be heading for the Costa Cálida. Unless airlines schedule flights to and from Corvera, though, many will most likely be doing so via Alicante-Elche airport, where on Monday alone there were 62 UK flights.

In the meantime, Marcos Ortuño, the minister for Tourism in the regional government, reports that Ryanair are expecting a sharp rise in passenger numbers on flights to and from Murcia, adding that efforts are being made to add more direct connections with airports in France, Germany and Portugal, as well as Madrid and Galicia, in the north-west of Spain. Whether these new additions will materialize, and whether more traffic to and from the UK returns to Corvera this summer, remains to be seen.

Much depends on the evolution of the coronavirus pandemic in both countries, and currently the figures are heading in decidedly the wrong direction.