After the coronavirus pandemic put pay to international travel for the most of the previous two years, 2022 saw Liverpool John Lennon Airport work to recover.
Navigating the challenges have not been straightforward, but Liverpool Airport has won plenty of praise over the past 12 months. The airport managed to avoid most of the problems which beset others up and down the country - particularly in the summer.
Facing their first peak season without covid restrictions, many airports struggled to cope with demand. Scenes of long queues, significant delays and cancellations became commonplace.
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However, Liverpool's advanced planning allowed it to have a successful year and the arrival of two international airlines has provided a tonic, according to CEO John Irving. Mr Irving spoke to the ECHO about the airport's development over the past year and how it worked to bring operations back to normal, while looking to the future.
He said: “If you go back 12 months to the start of the year we had Omicron around and we weren’t sure if that was going to delay our recovery. The first three months were a bit stop-start, but what we did was make sure that we were ready for Easter, which was the time when we knew airline capacity was going to come back in for the holidays."
Mr Irving said that preparation has allowed the airport to enjoy a successful year. He said: "The first three months of the year were very much about trying to get ourselves prepared and ready for a restart - whatever that restart looked like.
"As we rolled into Easter and onwards, we’ve had a very positive year here at the airport. We’re probably at around 80% of our pre-pandemic passenger numbers, which is good.
"We’ll be at about four million passengers for the financial year to the end of March. It used to be five million, but summer holidays and half-term holidays have seen the routes that you would expect to be busy, have been actually really busy.
"We are in recovery but we’re definitely well on the way back to some level of normality from a numbers point of view. I think the positive thing here at Liverpool is the way the airport has coped with people coming back.
"We’ve had a lot of praise, but actually a lot of the hard work that we did during the pandemic and in the restart really paid off."
As many airports faced chaotic summers, with queues spilling into car parks and many flights cancelled, Liverpool's operation ran smoothly. The airport's social media team made a number of knowing references to this, occasionally sending jibes to their counterparts down the M62 at Manchester Airport, where passengers often had tumultuous experiences.
In August, the airport's operations director Paul Staples told the ECHO the airport's successful comeback from covid was built on advanced planning and speed in resolving issues that hung over from the pandemic - most prominently staffing. The airport pencilled in Easter 2022 as the time when foreign travel may return to a semblance of normality.
Mr Staples said: "The main challenges for airports around the country have been well-documented. First of all, getting the start date right (out of the pandemic ) wasn’t easy.
"It was heavily-linked to the stop-start activities of the government - they gave aviation hope that we were actually starting, people recruited, they got shops, concessions starting to re-open and then they stopped again on a couple of occasions.
"But I think that at the beginning of this year, some of the bigger airports found it more costly to take a gamble and go all in for an Easter start, whereas the smaller regional airports like ourselves could probably take that chance a little bit easier, in terms of the financial risks involved.
"We sat as a group in November 2021 and said ‘let’s assume that Easter is going to be the first proper start and let’s staff up for Easter’. We pretty much started recruiting at the turn of the year, with that in mind.
"One of the other beneficial things we had at Liverpool was that we took the view very early on that we wanted to come out of the pandemic with as much of the skills and expertise that we had on site still with us. So, we didn’t make the vast swathing redundancies that other airports did. We made 20-30 people redundant in the Liverpool Airport team and that was it."
Mr Irving believes the approach has paid dividends this year, saying " We’ve had no real queues, we’ve had no delays, we’ve had very, very few cancellations - of which none have been because of the airport.
"Unlike some other airports, we’ve been able to offer people the travel experience that they want - it’s slightly different to how it used to be, but people have been able to get through the airport with the same speed as it was before, so I’d say that’s the biggest positive of the year. While we’re not fully back to normal, our operation and customer service levels are right back to where they were.
The past year has also seen the Speke-based airport welcome new airlines. Lufthansa began operating from Liverpool in May, offering connections to long-haul, global destinations after a change at Frankfurt. Earlier this month, the airline announced that it would increase to six services a week from Liverpool for summer 2023.
Another new arrival was Icelandic airline PLAY, which joined the airport in October. The airline flies from Liverpool to Reykjavík–Keflavík Airport, from where passengers can board onward flights to the United States.
Mr Irving cited this as being key for the airport's recovery. He said: "From an airline point of view, our partners have worked really well with us. But to announce and launch Lufthansa in December 2021 and then start flying in May was great.
"It’s something we’ve been working on as an airport and a city region for at least four years, so to land that in a post-pandemic climate has been a real tonic, a real positive statement of where the airport is and where it wants to be.
"It’s performed really well, we’ve had people checking in going to Wellington in New Zealand, going to Thailand and obviously a lot of people going to Germany and to Europe. To have that connectivity at any point in time is a real positive, but to have it coming out of the pandemic has been really good.
"It’s the same with PLAY, which started in October and is doing really well. Most of the people in my team have been to see the Northern Lights over the past few weeks, but we’ve also seen people going out to America and lots coming into Liverpool for a long weekend or a week trip.
"It is part of what PLAY do, but it’s probably a little bit of a surprise that it’s picked up so quickly. It’s a real positive impact to have that connectivity back at Liverpool."
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