Murcia Airport – The Low-Cost Option to Costa Blanca

The last decade was one of the most successful in the history of Murcia’s San Javier Airport following the arrival of low-cost airlines keen to take advantage of its location to bring holidaymakers to Costa Cálida and the southern resort towns of the Costa Blanca. A reduction in capacity from Ryanair has seen traffic decline in the past couple of years but has opened up opportunities for other operators to fill the clear demand for air services into this region of south-eastern Spain.

The airport was originally used exclusively as a military air base after the Spanish navy acquired the large plot of land near Santiago de la Ribera, on the Mar Menor in the early 1920s. The first plans for the facility were drawn up in 1927 and by 1932 operations were transferred from Barcelona. It was not until the early 1960s that the idea of using the facility for commercial transport was first discussed and on July 20, 1964 a formal decree opened the facility to civilian air traffic. However, in the years that followed significant works were required and the main runway and taxiway infrastructure was improved, enabling San Javier to welcome its first commercial passenger aircraft on November 1, 1968. The flight from Madrid was quickly followed by regular links to Barcelona and Almería.

Alongside domestic flights, the completion of a Customs Office in March 1969 enabled the airport to handle international services and in the years that followed a large number of charter operators began to use San Javier to bring holidaymakers on Inclusive Tour packages into the region. However, it was the renovation and expansion of the passenger terminal and main apron in the 1990s, and then further in the last decade, that has enabled capacity grow, providing space to handle up to eleven airliners and ten general aviation aircraft simultaneously.

A new Air Traffic Control tower has been opened and earlier this year a second runway was put into operation. This is to be used exclusively by the military, but will mean that the civilian facility will be able to make better utilisation of the existing runway, particularly during morning periods when military exercises had previously restricted the airport to commercial traffic.

In the last year Murcia San Javier handled 1,349,333 passengers and 13,474 aircraft movements. As the table below shows, the airport has witnessed rapid growth since the start of the last decade with an almost ten-fold increase in a six year period.

Like many airports across Europe, Murcia San Javier has seen a decline in passenger traffic over the past year. It reached its peak in 2007 when it handled two million passengers for the first time ever. It currently has links to more than20 destinations with the main overseas markets being to the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland.

These flights are almost exclusively operated by low-cost carriers, the only exception being Iberia’s regional jets link to the Spanish capital Madrid. Jet2.com, which provides a range of seat-only and travel packages through its Jet2holidays.com subsidiary, is currently the second largest operator by frequency and seats with links to five destinations in the UK. But it is Ryanair that dominates the market despite significantly scaling-back its operations earlier in the year. It accounts for 49.8 per cent of the total weekly seat capacity with flights to nine destinations in the UK and Republic of Ireland.

With such a strong demand from the UK, the airport is targeting other departure points in the country for growth as well as boosting frequencies on existing routes. It is also looking to develop new services to Belgium, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Republic of Ireland and Scandinavia, open more domestic flights including routes to Barcelona and Palma de Mallorca, and a regular link to Marrakech, Morocco. The airport sees a huge potential to grow links to the North African country with around 120,000 Moroccans believed to be resident in its catchment area.