Spoiled for choice – an airport near you!
With the MIDAS Aviation team heading for Valencia in the next day or two for AviaDev Europe, we’ve been preparing for plenty of discussion about regional aviation in Europe by providing AviaDev with several articles about different aspects of the industry and the market. There’s one about the impact and implications of the demise of a number of European airlines that we’ve seen this year. We look at long haul connectivity for regional airports in another and the most recent one looks at the use of turboprops.
We thought we might have exhausted what we had to say about the European regional aviation market at this time but then we started having a play with some mapping data which can be used to visualise data and decided to post a couple of our maps.
The first shows the Top 400 airports in Europe with their 90-minute drivetimes. While it is apparent that many airports in Eastern Europe and Scandinavia have distinct catchment areas, for much of western and central Europe you are never too far from an airport. One catchment area overlaps and runs into another meaning that passengers have a huge amount of choice about where they fly from.
90 Minute Drivetimes from Europe’s Top 400 Airports
Having considered Europe as a whole, we took a look at Valencia. This time we didn’t look at for overlapping catchment areas but just the extent of the catchment area as measured by 30-minute, 60-minute, 90-minute and 120-minute drive times. The catchment area does, in fact overlap with Murcia and Alicante to the south and may do so with Barcelona and Girona to the north, and even Madrid to the west.
30, 60, 90 and 120 Minutes Drive Time from Valencia Airport
The software allows us to overlay the catchment area with data about population so it is easy to see that within this 120-minute drive time there are 5.2 million people living. Within the 30-minute drivetime there are 1.5 million people.
Although slightly dated as it is derived from census data, we can also add in data about where these people were born, helping us understand the social make-up of the catchment area and the diaspora links with other parts of the worlds – all useful information when trying to understand air service development opportunities. What this data shows is that 86% of the local population were born outside Spain. That’s about 850,000. While nearly half were born somewhere else in the EU, with Romania, UK, France and Germany being the main countries of birth, there are sizeable populations from elsewhere including 73,000 born in Morocco, 53,000 in Ecuador and 51,000 in Colombia. Almost quarter of a million people living in the area were born in the Americas.
Valencia has no direct air services to the Americas; clearly, people wanting to travel there can drive to Madrid given its proximity, or take a connecting flight. According to OAG Traffic Analyser there are in fact 132,000 people flying between Valencia and the America’s each way over the course of a year – and this doesn’t include those number who chose to fly from another airport.
This is why we love working with data. A few numbers. A few charts. And an interesting story emerges.
Talk to us at AviaDev Europe for information about mapping your catchment area, market analysis to support air service development or just to chat.