Shannon airport could take an additional 3m passengers immediately, Shannon group CEO Mary Considine has said in the debate over the passenger cap at Dublin airport.
Speaking at the industry leaders forum at the ITIC conference, she said: Seventy per cent of the jobs in tourism are outside the capital. If the jobs are out there, that’s where people want to go, and that’s where people are spending. So we need to make sure that we have the air access into the regions to further that growth and support it going forward.
We’ve heard about the constraints, particularly with the cap at Dublin Airport. The cap exists today, so it’s not an either/or; it’s how we can come together and provide solutions. At a time when we’ve underutilized capacity in the airports outside of the capital, we could take an additional 3m passengers today. We know that 40pc of the tours coming through Dublin Airport are going straight down to the west.
The Irish Travel Industry Confederation conference in Dublin attracted 300 leading tourism professionals to the Dublin Royal convention centre to hear the major issues of concern to the industry being discussed.
If you look at the overall picture, having 86pc of all aviation going through one airport is putting huge reliance on that critical airport infrastructure. Nobody’s disputing that Dublin isn’t critical to the economy or that it’s not a hub airport, but there’s a lot of other traffic going through that is congesting it.
You know, we talk about 40pc of the traffic coming into the country. We layer on top of that the businesses. For example, 50pc of the foreign direct investment is within our catchment area. They are not only getting their goods and people to market, but that’s spend for our whole hospitality sector—by people coming into the country, their board of directors coming in, their investors coming in, and they want to stay closer to where those businesses are, and they want the air access.
So I think there are a couple of crucial things. We work very closely with Tourism Ireland on the cooperative marketing spend to support that air access into the regions. We need to be very competitive to allow our airline partners to continue to grow. We need to improve the public transport infrastructure, so there are things that we can do today to improve things. But there is a huge opportunity, and with 86pc going through Dublin airport, that is complete overreliance on one critical infrastructure. If anything goes wrong, as we’ve seen recently, the whole thing falls apart, and that’s not good.
