Cardiff Airport has got it's mojo back !

Now we can start to forget about BMIBaby, stop looking back and start looking forward. Don’t get me wrong, there are still challenges facing Cardiff Airport but the acquisition of 4 new routes in the past 10 months is progress. In fact to be fair to Spencer and his team at the airport they’ve pulled it out of the bag in a very tough market.

In case you’re not familiar with the new routes they are:

•      Helvetic to Zurich
•     Vueling to Barcelona
•      Vueling to Alicante
•      Vueling to Mallorca

As I said, there are still challenges facing the airport , from a FlyCardiff perspective we feel that the biggest challenges facing the airport are:

•    Bristol Airport – which continues to be bullish, predatory and always pushing for new routes
•   The lack of awareness of Wales as a destination outside of the UK
•  The fact that the Welsh people need to be reminded that we do have an airport and not automatically    think Bristol for flights
•   The PR of the airport. It doesn’t have a great image and it’s refusal to spend money advertising new routes doesn’t help get the message out there. Twitter and facebook are good but not everyone engages with them.
•     The fact that sometimes compared to commutable competitor airports some of  the fares are not competitive. It’s no good the MD saying “talk to the airlines not us, they set the prices” is just not good enough. The bottom line is that such a situation means that passengers choose to fly from other airports. How as a business owner, can you tolerate such a situation which clearly does damage your business. It baffles us.

Our message to the airport is to focus on your circle on influence and also work with others to reduce your circle of concern (i.e. things that concern you but you can’t influence on your own). Sorry for the management speak it’s from Stephen Covey’s 7 habits of Highly Effective People.

So, in school report fashion we’d give the airport a C+. If I was writing this report at start of October it would have been a D-. Keep up the good work, don’t be complacent or rest on your laurels. A lot of work is still needed to turn this round and we’ll support you where we can,