Dublin Airport warns of revenue hit from passenger cap

Ireland’s biggest airport has warned it will miss out on revenue growth of 10% because of a 16-year-old cap on passenger numbers that could push airlines to expand at UK and other European hubs instead. Although Ireland is a small island, its open economy makes it disproportionately dependent on air travel and the Dublin-London route is among the busiest in Europe. But since 2007, the main gateway to the country has been limited to 32mn passengers a year, not counting those in transit. Other European airports are facing pressure to reduce flights for environmental reasons — an international outcry forced the Dutch government to pause efforts to cut flights at Amsterdam’s Schiphol. Climate concerns have threatened projects at UK airports and led France to abandon plans for a new terminal at Paris Charles de Gaulle in 2021. But the state-owned Dublin Airport Authority is seeking to go the other way, and has applied for permission to raise the cap to 40mn. Last year, 31.9mn people passed through Dublin Airport, 1.1mn of whom were in transit, while turnover during the first six months of 2023 rose 55% on a year earlier to E459m. Increasing passenger numbers to 35mn — where DAA CE Kenny Jacobs predicts they could be by the end of next year, were it not for the cap — would mean “about 10% additional revenue . . . 10% growth out there that could be forgone because we’re stalled at 32mn because of the cap”, he told the Financial Times. Big airlines and the Irish prime minister have warned that maintaining the cap could hit an economy where multinationals such as Microsoft, Apple, Google and Pfizer pay billions of euros in corporation tax. Jacobs, a former Ryanair chief marketing officer who took over as DAA CE last year, said airlines want to expand in Dublin because they “make an absolute killing” thanks to regulated passenger charges that average less than half the level of European peers.<br/>