Eelde is going through a very difficult period
Groningen Airport Eelde is the smallest airport in the Netherlands, and has managed to grow in recent years. But last year, 2019, the number of passengers dropped by no less than 23 percent. As reported by RTV Drenthe.
Never before have so many people have flown into and out of The Netherlands as 2019. Dutch airports processed 81 million passengers, but only Groningen Airport Eelde managed not to grow.
This is according to figures from the Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS). More than 81 million passengers flew from Dutch airports. Schiphol is the largest. The smallest is Groningen Airport Eelde. Regional airports such as Eindhoven Airport, Maastricht Aachen Airport and Groningen Airport Eelde together processed 9.5 million passengers.
Growth everywhere… except Eelde
The CBS figures show that it is a decrease in the number of passengers at the airport in Drenthe by 23 percent. In 2019 there were 176,022 passengers coming through Eelde. In the record year 2018 there were 228,698.
The cause is the loss of scheduled services from Nordica Air to Copenhagen and Munich. The Latvian airline stopped the flights in December 2018.
The most popular destination in The Netherlands is still London, and this is also true for Groningen Airport Eelde. Stobart Air operates near-daily flights to London on behalf of struggling UK regional airline FlyBe. The much smaller AIS Airlines is aimed at business customers and flies to Copenhagen and Münster almost daily.
Another issue that Airport Eelde must deal with is the growing importance travellers are attaching to reducing their emissions. One of the biggest, and most unnecessary producers of emissions per capita is short-haul flying, and more and more people are choosing to take the train instead.
