Summer holiday season kicks off with busiest July at London Stansted Airport
London Stansted Airport saw more than 2.7 million passengers travel through the airport in July as the summer holiday season got underway.
This is an increase of 7.4 percent on July of last year, despite airline industrial action, ongoing weather disruption and air traffic challenges across Europe throughout the month. The destination countries recording the largest growth in terms of passengers flown were Spain, France and Germany.
The busiest ever July at the airport helped boosted total passenger numbers for the past 12 months to just under 27 million, a 7.3 per cent increase on the previous year.
July was also a busy month for cargo traffic, with more than 22,000 tonnes of goods passing through the dedicated cargo facilities, an increase of 4.5 per cent on July 2017. This brings the rolling 12-month total to nearly 262,000 tonnes.
As the main summer holiday season firmly gets underway, July is always a very busy month for us and this year we have welcomed a record number of passengers to the airport.
We always work hard to ensure that going into the peak season our passengers have the best possible service and this year we introduced a number of improvements to our operation including recruiting more security staff, the introduction of new Airport Ambassador roles, creating more check-in desks, improved access to the forecourt and the opening of a new 350 seat restaurant.
Over the next five years we are investing £600m in transforming the airport experience for passengers, the main elements of which will be the construction of a new arrivals terminal, a re-vamp of the existing terminal, upgrades to the baggage system and more car parking spaces.
With limited spare capacity at other airports in the South East, Stansted will deliver 50 percent of London’s expected passenger growth over the next decade. Given this anticipated growth, we have applied for permission to raise the number of passengers we serve to 43 million a year, with a firm commitment to do so without any additional flights or noise impacts beyond our current permissions.
