Full year Heathrow passenger figures for 2022 — GRIDPOINT CONSULTING

Overall passenger volumes for 2022 down 24% on 2019

Back in October last year, I wrote about how the UK’s biggest airport was faring as the airline industry finally emerged from the pandemic in my article “Heathrow: taking stock after the pandemic”.

One of the topics I explored was the huge mismatch between the airport’s own forecasts for 2022 passenger traffic and those coming from airlines and other commentators, including me. The airport spent the year lobbying its regulator, the CAA, to allow it to put up landing fees per passenger by eye-watering amounts. It justified the need to do that with “low-balled” forecasts for passenger numbers. The airlines had the opposite incentive and put forward much more optimistic forecasts. When the CAA set the fees for 2022 back in June 2021, it adopted a figure between the two, but very close to Heathrow’s figures.

I’ve set out the various “forecasts” for 2022 passenger numbers in the chart below. It’s the same chart as I included in my earlier article, but I’ve now been able to add the actual outturn of 61.6m passengers. No surprises that this was way above Heathrow’s initial 42.2m forecast. It was of course also below the airline’s “high-balled” forecast of 72.0m passengers. If the CAA had “split the difference” between the airline and airport forecast they would have done much better than they did, although they would still have been too low. For the record, getting to the actual outturn would have required giving a weight of 64% to the airline view and 36% to the airport view. Perhaps the CAA might want to file away that “rule of thumb” for future reference.

My own forecast of 60.9m, made in December 2021 proved to be just 1% too pessimistic. After the operational problems of the summer, with Heathrow capping passenger numbers, I revised my forecast down a bit to 59.8m, describing it as a “reasonably conservative forecast” at the time. In reality, passenger numbers finished the year more strongly than this forecast assumed.