Manchester Airports Group loses £10 per second due to Covid restrictions

The impact of Covid travel restrictions on the aviation industry has been revealed by the staggering losses of one of its biggest businesses. Manchester Airports Group (MAG), which also owns Stansted and East Midlands airports, lost £10 per second in its last financial year.

MAG lost £320m between April 2021 and March 2022, which was slightly down on the previous loss of £374m.

The three airports handled 20.5 million passengers, just one third of 2019-20 levels.

But MAG is optimistic about the summer peak, saying: “The group expects passenger volumes over these months to increase to levels close to those seen in 2019, leading to a fuller recovery over the course of 2022/23.

Since international travel resumed at scale in March, passengers using Manchester Airport have suffered a series of misfortunes, including flights missed due to long security queues and last-minute cancellations because of ground-handling staff shortage.

Charlie Cornish, chief executive of the group, said: “With travel restrictions in place for nearly all of the last 12 months, it was another uncertain and unpredictable year for MAG and the wider aviation industry.

“After tentative steps towards recovery last autumn, the emergence of the Omicron variant once again resulted in major barriers for people looking to travel internationally.

“MAG played an industry-leading role in highlighting the ineffectiveness of international travel testing, which helped pave the way for the removal of travel restrictions in spring this year.

“Free of those restrictions, we were confident that airlines and passengers would return quickly to our airports.

“The pace of that recovery has brought its own challenges, and recruitment has taken longer and been more difficult than we anticipated. We’ve now recruited more than 1,500 new staff across MAG since January so that we can give passengers the best possible experience this summer.

“With passenger levels across MAG growing quickly back towards what they were before the pandemic, I am confident in the strength of our business and the contribution our airports will once again make for their regions and the whole UK economy.”

The UK government eased testing requirements for fully vaccinated travellers last autumn, leading to MAG’s passenger numbers reaching 58 per cent of pre-pandemic levels in November 2021, in what the industry hoped was the beginning of a sustained recovery.

But when the Omicron variant began to spread, the government imposed tough new restrictions, including self-isolation for all arrivals, which caused MAG’s initial recovery to fall back by around 30 per cent month-on-month in December.

Manchester airport is currently seeing an average of four British Airways flights to and from London Heathrow grounded as BA struggles with a shortage of resources.