April 11th - Birmingham airport – only 32 minutes from Old Oak Common
Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast
The Independent
3.6 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 11 April 2025
⏱️ 7 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
That's the long-term prospect for the West Midlands airport, which aims to compete with the London airports. In the very short term, Birmingham is expecting its busiest Easter ever. I'm talking to the airport's chief executive, Nick Barton, who says the restoration of flights to New York can't come soon enough.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast. It's Friday the 11th of April, |
| 0:05.4 | which means that we're one week away from Good Friday. The airports are getting busier and busier. |
| 0:11.5 | I'm at Birmingham Airport, the seventh busiest in the UK, talking to the chief executive, |
| 0:18.0 | Nick Barton. I was here last summer when there was work going on and there were |
| 0:23.4 | concerns about the length of security cues. Well, now everything seems to be going very smoothly. |
| 0:28.9 | Good to see you again, Nick. Tell us how you're looking forward to Easter. |
| 0:32.9 | Well, we always do look forward to these seasonal trips because everyone's in a great frame of mind. They're going |
| 0:38.1 | on a short holiday, probably the first since the winter came to an end. They're meeting friends and |
| 0:42.7 | relatives and all of which makes passengers, I think, just that little bit more excited than normal. |
| 0:48.0 | So we love Easter. It's a great time for the airport and it's our first busy test of the year |
| 0:52.3 | because of the volumes, as you've said, are record volumes for us over an Easter period and it's our first busy test of the year because of the volumes, as you've said, are record |
| 0:54.7 | volumes for us over an Easter period and it's something that we look forward to make sure we do our |
| 0:59.5 | best. Well, just looking out the window, there's a big easy jet aircraft waiting there and that |
| 1:05.5 | is your big new customer since last Easter. Are you going to be able to handle the extra numbers? Oh yes. I mean we've |
| 1:13.1 | planned for a considerable increase, about 6% passenger increase on our prior year, our financial year |
| 1:19.4 | once the end of March. We've just closed it and we have exceeded 13 million passengers for the |
| 1:24.4 | first time in our history. And this year, we expect that to rise nearer to |
| 1:28.5 | 14 million passengers. So significant increase, but we knew this was on the way and therefore we |
| 1:33.4 | plan for it both in terms of our operations, our people, our resources and crucially our infrastructure. |
| 1:38.9 | So there's a lot of building work going on and that will continue to be the case as we build |
| 1:42.8 | more baggage capacity, more |
| 1:44.8 | immigration capacity to make sure all of those extra passengers have a good experience. |
... |
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