Ryanair and Vueling flights carried 45% of all passengers to Malaga Airport last year
London still tops the list but more people flew to the Costa del Sol from Barcelona, Amsterdam, Brussels, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Frankfurt, Madrid, Helsinki and Oslo in 2021 compared with 2019
The pandemic has completely changed the tourism scenario on the Costa del Sol and the airlines who bring the most passengers to the area. A recent study by the Costa del Sol Tourist Board comparing Malaga airport last year with 2019, before the pandemic, shows that 45 per cent of arrivals travelled with Ryanair or Vueling and there was a diversification in source markets, with the Netherlands and Scandinavian countries particularly strong.
More passengers arrived last year from Barcelona, Amsterdam, Paris, Brussels, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Frankfurt and Madrid, although London still tops the list, with 306,913 travellers last year compared with 1,168,000 in 2019, a reduction of 73.7 per cent.
The study looked at the 15 most important source markets for the Costa del Sol and the airport’s nine main competitors in Spain: Balearics, Las Palmas, Barcelona, Madrid, Tenerife, Alicante, Valencia, Lanzarote and Seville. It showed that they all registered was a considerable drop in passenger numbers.
The markets which declined the least and did better than average in terms of arrivals at Malaga airport were Spain, with a reduction of 31.1%; Netherlands, down 37.7%; Switzerland, with a drop of 38.1%; Belgium, Poland and Denmark, with a reduction of about 42% and France, from where there were 50.6 per cent fewer visitors.
This new scenario showed that 60 per cent of arrivals in Malaga in 2021 were from five markets: Spain (22.3%); UK, which went from nearly 30% before the pandemic to 15.3%; Germany and Netherlands 7.9%; and France, with 7.2%.
With regard to the airlines, Ryanair (29%) and Vueling (15.3%) together accounted for 45% of the market, followed by Transavia Holland in third place, a position normally held by Easyjet, which was fourth. Scandinavian Airlines was fifth on the list.
The study highlights some curious changes in the past three years, with a strong reduction in arrivals from practically every country with the exception of Morocco, which grew by 235 per cent, because it was not possible to travel by ferry.
It also shows that the Costa del Sol has become the main destination for Finnish travellers, and the second most popular for the Dutch, Swedish and Norwegians. These changes could provide a major opportunity for Malaga to acquire the loyalty of these new visitors and lessen its longstanding dependence on the UK as its principal source market.
