Spanish Airport Guide News

Valencia is Spain’s third largest city and until early 2004 the only UK airports with non-stop scheduled flights to Valencia Airport were London Heathrow and London Gatwick. Normally the first non-London airport to be able to support non-stop flights to an international destination is Manchester, followed by Birmingham, but the first non-London airport to offer scheduled flights to Valencia was Coventry (when Thomsonfly began flights from its new base there at the end of March 2004), followed by Bristol.

The surge in demand for flights to Valencia Airport in 2004 coincided with increased awareness of the City of the Arts and Sciences complex designed by the architect Santiago Calatrava. In 2007 the America’s Cup was based in the old port (as it will be again this summer) and last year saw the inaugural European Grand Prix on a street circuit laid out around the harbour area.

By the end of 2008 13 UK airports were offering flights to Valencia and in just two years traffic quadrupled from under 200,000 to almost 800,000 passengers a year. Several of the new services were short-lived and in 2008 just seven airports (instead of 11 in 2007) offered scheduled services.  Since then Clickair has abandoned its Heathrow service (which it inherited from Iberia), Jet2.com has given up its Leeds/Bradford service (it had already abandoned the Manchester and Newcastle services at the end of 2007) and Ryanair ceased its Liverpool route as part of its decommissioning of its base at Valencia Airport.

This summer there are just four airports in the UK with scheduled flights to Valencia with  easyJet flying  twice-daily from London Gatwick and daily from Bristol, while Ryanair operates twice-daily from London Stansted and four times each week from Nottingham East Midlands.

Passenger numbers from the UK declined by 12% in 2008 and the reduced capacity this summer has seen demand in the first five months ofall by almost 60%. Traffic for 2009 is likely to be around 300,000, which  is still double the number transported between Valencia and the UK in  2002.