2012, A VINTAGE YEAR FOR BORDEAUX AIRPORT AIR TRAFFIC FOR MARCH INCREASES 13.8%

03/04/2012

At the time when the Bordeaux châteaux are receiving thousands of primeurs fair visitors from all over the world, Bordeaux Airport once again announces excellent results.

For a few days now, wine stockists, wholesalers and traders have been flocking to Bordeaux for the great annual primeurs fair. These Bordeaux wines, like foreign oil or currency, are bought in forward purchase agreements, which is to say before the wines are even packaged. It is a speculative gamble which can be extremely profitable for international traders. Everyone converges on Bordeaux- Chinese, American, Brazilian, British, Dutch, Russian, Belgian, German, more than one hundred nationalities take over all of the region’s hotels…and they’ve got a nose for a bargain- in two or three years they will be able to re-sell their bottles at a much higher price, creating a big profit margin.

Clearly, the results for Bordeaux Airport benefits from these international exchanges with a +13.8% traffic increase in March 2012. The passenger traffic over the first three months of the year has increased by +10.7%.

Whilst domestic traffic has increased by +8.6%, it is above all the international traffic with an increase of +26% which has boosted growth at the airport of the capital of South-West France.

Since the start of the year, the great majority of routes have shown positive scores.

In descending order, the routes which serve Bordeaux by passenger volume:

Paris, 380,350 passengers, +5.3% including Paris-CDG +10.8%,
Lyon, 111,000 passengers, équivalent,
London-Gatwick, 54,392 passengers, + 30%
Marseille, 47,630 passengers, +39%
Madrid, 25,301 passengers, +64%
Amsterdam, 24,455 passengers, +4,7%
Geneva, 24,430 passengers, -16%
Rome, 19,365 passengers, +164%
Casablanca, 19,177 passengers, -15,8%
Basel, 13,346 passengers, +20,7%
Charleroi, 12,336 passengers, +7.4%
Porto, 11,620 passengers, +25%
Barcelona, 11,617 passengers, +159%.

Only chartered routes are on the decrease at 11%, mainly affected by the poor results of the big tourist destinations in North Africa (Tunisia and Morocco), as well as Senegal, which suffered social unrest linked to the presidential elections in this country.