Report claims planned airport capacity is over-optimistic

Print Article E-Mail Article

Boston Consulting Group claims that regional airports will struggle to survive after too much investment in capacity

A report by consultancy firm Boston Consulting Group claims that global investment in air transport will result in big over-capacity at airports in five to 10 years, and that many regional airports will struggle to survive. The company's findings were published today in journals across Europe, including Germany's Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and Handelsblatt.
The findings are sure to provoke controversy in a trade where rapid growth in air transport has been taken almost as an article of faith. ACI Europe has been particularly critical of governments and other organisations that have been slow to add passenger capacity, in the belief that numbers will keep rising and that infrastructure investment is urgently required for them to be able to cope.

Boston Consulting Group said that the planned global investment in airports, estimated at Eu150-200bn ($180-240bn), reflected an annual increase in total passenger numbers of between 6.6% and 11.4%, yet figures from Boeing, Airbus and IATA forecast growth of 2-4% a year over the next 10 years. In the US and Europe, it said, forecasts were even lower than in Asia/Pacific.

The report said that only the very biggest international hubs could expect to attain the forecast growth levels. It said in future there would only be a handful of these worldwide, including London, Paris, Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta, Singapore, Hong Kong and possibly one of the Chinese airports, probably Shanghai.
Many other mid-sized and regional airports would struggle to survive and those in Europe would need to attract more traffic from low-cost carriers to justify the projected over-investment.