Carol O’Donoghue, Route Development & Marketing Manager, Kerry Airport: “We are constantly speaking with our current operators, both in terms of current route performances and the possibility of growing the number of routes they operate from Kerry.”
Ireland’s tourism industry grew by over 13% during the first six months of this year, and Kerry Airport has been a witness to this growth. A key factor has been the Wild Atlantic Way – the 2,500km route along the Atlantic coast from Cork to Donegal, which is the longest defined coastal drive in the world. Kerry Airport is only 14km from the coast, so is one of the key access points to Ireland’s most recent tourism success story. “It is our intention to capitalise on this,” asserted Carol O’Donoghue, Route Development & Marketing Manager, Kerry Airport. “It has always been our argument that if an airline is developing routes to Ireland, then they will need to rely heavily on inbound dominated tourism and Kerry Airport is situated in the jewel of the crown of Irish tourism, attracting record numbers of tourists to the region year-on-year.”
The airport expects to handle 300,000 passengers this year. While slightly down on 2013 – partly because of Ryanair reducing frequency on its Stansted service – it is 4% up on the airport’s budgeted passenger numbers for 2014. The proactive strategy being employed has seen Kerry Airport work closely with local government and various tourism organisations over the past two years. “Our route development strategy is closely tied to the successful application of destination marketing initiatives,” O’Donoghue explained. “As the airport in the region, we need to be a key player in the destination marketing organisation to ensure we are all working cohesively and focusing our resources correctly to increase traffic on existing services, and also target routes that can generate traffic from our source tourism markets. In the short to medium-term, our focus is on the three tourist growth markets for the region: UK, France and Germany. It is our intention that as an airport we attract routes that have long-term sustainability. As a destination, we have been working together to identify the markets and potential routes that we know would work and are willing to support.”
Kerry Airport celebrated the 25th anniversary of its first scheduled flight in May, and significantly the first two scheduled services – Aer Lingus to Dublin and Ryanair to London Luton – are still in operation, reinforcing the airport’s policy of building sustainable routes.
The Dublin route is of vital importance to the region when looking at business development. “We have a number of large home-grown multi-national companies, such as Kerry Group and FEXCO, both of which rely on links to get their executives to the various offices around the world and also bring customers in,” O’Donoghue said. “The airport can and has acted as a selling point in attracting new companies to the county, such as an arm of the Japanese bank JRI America, as well as encouraging new start-ups that, with access to Dublin and beyond, setting up a company in Kerry is not an obstacle to growth. The Kerry-Dublin route also acts as a feeder of tourists to the county, with Dublin Airport being the main access point for overseas visitors to Ireland.”
The latest route announcement has been the opening up of long-haul markets via Aer Lingus and Etihad, which has been a hugely important development for the region, both for tourism and business. Passengers can now book online with Aer Lingus from San Francisco International Airport, New York-JFK, Boston Logan International Airport, Chicago O’Hare International Airport, Orlando International Airport, and Toronto Pearson International Airport to Kerry, connecting in Dublin, which has US border pre-clearance facilities. Etihad offers bookings to Kerry from Australia, the Middle East and Asia, also connecting in Dublin. “We are in talks with a number of airlines at present about future new routes and these negotiations are ongoing,” O’Donoghue added.
Meanwhile, it has been announced that Kerry will host CONNECT 2015 next June, enabling the airport together with its tourist partners to highlight the potential of the region to the airlines in attendance. “As a county our main industry is tourism, and as a provider of tourists to the region the airport plays a vital role in the social and economic well-being of the area in terms of employment both directly and indirectly,” O’Donoghue concluded.
