Q&A with London Gatwick chiefs as they announce financial results: Has the airport fully recovered from Covid? Are there new routes planned? Will the change in Government affect Northern runway plans?

19.9 million passengers travelled through the airport, an increase of 7.7% compared to the same period in 2023 and revenue at £488 million, up 15.3% compared to 2023. This included £239 million aeronautical income and £249 million from non-aeronautical sources, such as retail and parking.

EBITDA is at £268 million, up 13.9% compared to 2023, with net profit for the period at £106 million, up 33.8%.

London Gatwick Chief Executive Officer Stewart Wingate said the strong start was down to robust planning and a close collaboration with their partners which has ensured a reliable and enjoyable experience for Gatwick’s passengers.

We spoke to Mr Wingate along with the airport’s Chief Financial Officer Jim Butler about the results and what they show.

What are your main takeaways from the interim results and what do they show?

Jim Butler: It shows that we continue to develop the Airport from COVID in a very strong way. We have almost driven 20 million passengers through the Airport, which is up almost 8% year on year. We have a 15% increase in revenue on top of that, and it’s led to really good results. Those results are playing out in the service that our passengers are getting, and the partnership that we have with airlines, who have continued to expand the networks and work across the community to improve services that's being offered to customers. You'll be aware that our peak is part of the second half. But with the first half, we're pleased with how the how the results have come out.

Do these results show that you have almost full recovered from Covid?

Stewart Wingate: I think certainly, if you look at our financial performance, our revenues and our profit performance for some time now, actually, has been ahead of where we were before COVID. If you look at the passenger volumes, we still expect to be on a recovery path this year to get back to the passenger volumes that we had in 2019, but notwithstanding that we're still projecting to be 5% ahead of where we were last year, for the full year in 2024, so things are certainly moving in the right direction, there’s no question of that.

Passenger experience has contributed to these results, what are you doing to improve the experience at Gatwick?

Stewart Wingate: The passenger experience has always been essential to what we do a Gatwuick. We call them the core service standards, they're really the Service Level Agreements that are in place between us and our airlines and the performance in the first six months was tremendous due to the efforts of our front line stuff. We actually achieved every single one of the core service standards and that is amongst the strongest performance that we've seen at the airport, certainly in in my time at the airport, so we're really happy with that.

In addition to that, we worked really hard over the winter period with NATS to make sure that they got back to operate in the tower with normal levels of service, which, so far this year, has certainly done, so there significant improvement from them.

Then we have work collaboratively with the airlines to drive up punctuality, which is certainly improving over the first six months of this year.

There have been a number of new routes added at Gatwick, can we expect more?

Stewart Wingate: We continue to work really hard on this. I think if you look on our short haul network first of all, what we see is a short haul network where we are serving 160 different destinations, that's possibly the strongest short haul network of any airport across Europe, so we're really proud of that as a solid foundation for us. But on the long haul, which is where a lot of our efforts it's placed to grow more choice for passengers from our region, we are pleased to say that we've added 9 long haul routes already this year.

The areas we are really active in would be, for example, across North America, but also down into India, with more routes to follow later in the year and also routes in the Southeast Asia and China. And so we got all of the major Chinese carriers flying to and from Gatwick for the first time in 2024.

One of the real wind of the year for us was the flights with Singapore Airlines. That's something we've been chasing for many years, so we were delighted when they started services towards the end of June with five flights per but they've already announced they going to daily.

The examination phase for London Gatwick’s planning application (Development Consent Order) to bring its existing Northern Runway into routine use will end next week (Tuesday, August 27). What are you expecting and what are the next steps?

Stewart Wingate: We've worked for eight years to get to this stage, so there's a considerable effort being put in by members of my team to first of all come up with the concept. Secondly, to prove that the concept was safe to operate, which we did several years ago now. Then to build the planning application, which we continued doing during the COVID years to get it to a stage of being in the examination over the past six months.

That will finish on Tuesday next week. In terms of what happens next, the planning inspectorate panel, I think there is a team of four of five inspectors who were to listening to the evidences being put forward, now have three months to finalise their report. That will go forward to government and then we can expect towards the end of February to hear the decision of of the government

From our perspective we think the credentials of what we're putting forward, to use the existing Northern runway to make the best of our existing infrastructure, to enable us to secure more employment on the site and £1billion additional GVH to the local economy, the fact that it’s privately financed we'll get more connectivity and choice for passengers travelling to get with, is something that should be given to go ahead.

Will the change in Government make a change to the outcome?

Stewart Wingate: When we were putting our proposals together, and when we were submitting them in the summer of last year, we anticipated there would be a government change at some point this year. When we put the application in, the decision we took at the time was just to look at the merits of the case we had set out, so we are encouraged that the new Government certainly seems to want to to get the economy moving again. It certainly seems to be encouraging further employment opportunities. And certainly in the South East of England, this is probably the biggest privately-financed scheme that is available to the region. If the government boxes, which we think they should do, then we look forward to, first of all setting about the £2.2 billions of incremental cap ex spend and then the construction that'll happen. Then we will see the benefits as we open the runway towards the end of the decade and creating up to an additional 14,000 jobs across the region. We think there is a lot of merit in doing this scheme.