ARCHIVED - Corvera airport deserted; in October the airport lost 9 out of 10 passengers

The airport reported a fall of -89.9% in passenger numbers during October when compared to last year

It’s been a brutal year for the air travel sector and one of the easiest ways to appreciate the scale of the downturn in travel activity is to look at the statistics produced every month by Aena, which operates the majority of airports in Spain.

During October, airports in the Aena network, lost -81.9% of the passengers moved during the same month in 2019, handling just 4,458,349 travellers.

During the spring lockdowns, traffic was zero, and although the airport operator managed to claw back some passengers during the summer, the year is disastrous, the cumulative effect of the lockdowns, quarantines and restrictions on movement caused by the Covid leading to a reduction of -70.9% in traffic for the year to date.

Here in the Region of Murcia, the situation is equally disastrous for the regional airport at Corvera, which has seen its traffic slashed this year, with the panorama for the remainder of the year looking very bleak indeed.

The airport lost nine out of every ten passengers during October, handling only 10,966 passengers in October 2020 compared to 108,502 in 2019, intensifying the decline in passengers over the summer months to report an -89.9% fall in traffic for October.

So far this year the airport has processed 213,633 travellers, but at this same point last year traffic had reached 1,013,189 passengers, representing a decrease of 78.9% compared to 2019.

A lot of this situation in Corvera is due to the dependence on the UK market, which has suffered two significant setbacks; first the imposition of the UK 14 day quarantine on travellers returning from Spain and now the total lockdown of the UK.

But the principal problem has been the aircraft operators themselves, re-shuffling flight schedules, moving flights between airports and cancelling flights altogether in an effort to help their own operations survive in an increasingly difficult market.

For Corvera airport the result has been disastrous, with a raft of flight cancellations and flights either diverted to Alicante or the consolidation of routes prioritising Alicante over Corvera, so the Corvera flight from the same source airport has been cancelled, the only option left for clients being to use Alicante instead.

Alicante is also suffering a brutal decline in traffic, losing -83.1% of its traffic in October to process just 241,178 passengers and this year so far has accumulated a loss of -73.6% of its passengers, handling only 3.5 million travellers.

The winter flights programme should have begun at the end of October, but due to the deteriorating situation in Spain which resulted in the declaration of a second nationwide state of emergency, and the decision of the regional government of Murcia to impose an external regional border confinement, as well as internal border movement restrictions, along with the decision of neighbouring regional governments to also apply their own regional border restrictions, airlines suspended their winter routes programmes, leaving Corvera virtually flightless.

The second half of November is very bleak; Ryanair will stop operating flights to the United Kingdom on the 18th November, Binter has suspended its Canary islands Service, Jet2 has no flights to Corvera showing anywhere on its schedule and doesn´t even plan to resume flights to Alicante until February, Easyjet has cancelled vast swathes of flights right across Spain including all those programmed for Corvera for the remainder of November and TUI has also pruned back its own programme, refocusing on the Canary islands where it can guarantee a travel corridor between Germany during November.

In theory, the UK lockdown is scheduled to end on 2nd December, but yesterday the UK reported 33,470 new cases of covid-19 in a 24 hour period and 595 deaths, its worst figures of the pandemic so far……whether the government will be forced to extend the lockdown is unclear at the moment, but with Three Kings parades already cancelled in most major cities of Spain and Spain itself reporting an average of 20,000 cases a day, the festive season is already a write-off, if we’re realistic and honest with ourselves.

Binter hopes to resume the only national line that the airport retains as of December 1st to the Canary Islands, but the company freely admits that the border restrictions currently in place in the region prevent new clients from risking a booking, with the future evolution of the virus uncertain.

Ryanair had planned to fly to Manchester and Birmingham this winter, TUI was scheduled to connect the Region with Brussels, Bruges and Antwerp in Belgium and with the Dutch city of Eindhoven, EasyJet was going to fly to London Gatwick airport, but Aena is currently unwilling/unable to confirm any type of flight schedule for December, airlines simply direct enquries to webpages through which it is virtually impossible to gather an accurate schedule, and social media users continue to report a drip-drip of cancellations, so it’s proving very difficult to actually confirm which routes actually remain for the pre-Christmas period; all that is certain, is that there isn´t very much!.

The operator has limited its comments to “the airport is operational”, denying that the airport plans to close, but for the moment, the only wings flying in the installations are the occasional private plane and the sparrows scratching for their supper in the vegetation around the airport.