This article is from page 9 of the 2008-08-05 edition of The Clare People. OCR mistakes are to be expected so download the original SWF or the rendered page 9 JPG
THE big winner in Shannon losing its ‘stop-over’ status to the United States is Dublin Airport according to the lat- est figures where Shannon has lost 10 per cent of the market share of trans- atlantic traffic.
Confirming the gloomy predictions that Dublin would profit at the expense of Shannon in an Open Skies environ- ment, figures for the first six months show that Dublin Airport increased its transatlantic traffic by a whopping 36 per cent or 206,000 to 820,000.
Full Open Skies was introduced at the end of March and figures provided by the Shannon Airport Authority (SAA) from January to June show that the numbers of the transatlantic routes has dropped from 325,438 in 2007 to 262,858 — a drop of 19 per cent.
The figures show that Dublin has in- creased its market share of the trans- atlantic market from 65 per cent to 75 per cent in the first six months of this year while Shannon has seen a corol- lary decline going down from 35 per cent to 25 per cent.
The advent of Open Skies however has seen an overall increase of 8.8 per cent in the transatlantic market and the SAA will be looking to increase its market share in the upcoming years having predicted an initial drop in transatlantic traffic.
The figures showing the DAA prof- iting from Open Skies continues a pattern of other State-owned airports taking advantage of Shannon’s diffi- culties.
The decision by Aer Lingus to end its London Heathrow route from last January has resulted in a drop of 16 per cent or 57,000 for the first six months on London routes on last year’s figure.
However, the main beneficiaries to Shannon losing the Heathrow route the Cork Airport Authority (CAA) which has enjoyed a 13.5 per cent increase on its London Heathrow service, going from 224,669 for the first six months of last year to 255,000 from January to June this year.
In its traffic figures, the DAA also announced that passenger through- put at Dublin Airport exceeded 11.3 million for the first six months of the Merle
Fine Gael TD, Joe Carey said yes- terday that the figures are a huge con- cern. “The transatlantic market has been very good to the local economy over the years. It is disappointing that the Government didn’t invest in the €53 million economic and tourism plan. That would have resulted in a huge amount of marketing, but instead of the €53 million, all that was re- ceived was €3 million for the west of Ireland,” he said.