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Belfast Live
Belfast Live
National
Connor Lynch

Belfast International Airport chief says passenger confidence 'high' despite cancellations

Belfast International Airport has been "faring better" than UK counterparts as passenger confidence remains high despite airline cancellations.

The airport was found to be the most reliable in the UK over the past year with less flights cancelled and delayed than others.

It comes as a number of airlines have faced criticism for widespread flight cancellations that have left some passengers stranded abroad for days trying to return home.

Read more: Man arrested after 'smoking in the toilets' of Belfast to Spain flight

Over the past year, the airport has only had 37 flights cancelled, while other major airports have had hundreds. London Heathrow saw 4774 cancelled flights, Manchester 1347 and Glasgow 986.

33% of the flights at the airport had been delayed, compared to 51% of flights at Manchester Airport, with the average length of delays being 6 minutes.

Speaking to Belfast Live, Dan Owens, Chief Financial Officer at the airport, said that he understands the impact that flight cancellations can have on passengers and that Belfast International had been doing better than others in the UK with regards to reliability and a lot of work has taken place to ensure that.

He said: "For any passenger to have a flight cancelled or severely delayed is a terrible experience and I can understand their frustrations and work hard to minimise any impact that these can have.

"On a whole though, we have only had a handful of cancelled flights over the past few months and our passenger experience has been reported as being very positive.

"There are around 200 movements a day in and out of the airport, with between 60 to 70 of these being passenger flights and we have only seen at the most one or two flights cancelled in a week with this primarily being down to various airlines.

"Our flight schedule and passenger numbers have been reaching 2019 levels at times which shows there is still a lot of confidence with passengers flying out of the airport, excited to go on their first summer holidays in a couple of years.

"Overall we have been more reliable than our counterparts across the UK and a lot of that has been down to our planning and our commitment to hiring and training staff. This year we have held four job fairs across Northern Ireland and hired 200 new members of staff who are already well settled and we have been very pleased with their hard work and ability in their roles."

Manchester Airport was found to be the most unreliable airport in the UK followed by London Heathrow and Birmingham.

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