On Monday morning, Luxembourg airport in Findel held a press conference to announced details of the collaboration with Lorraine Airport, near Metz in France, which has temporarily closed its doors due to extensive renovation work on its runway.
The resurfacing of the runway means that the 25 year-old airport cannot function normally for 40 days, from 29 February to 15 April 2016. During this time, it is operating a shuttle service to and from Luxembourg airport for all its 23,000 passengers, or almost 600 daily. The airport is using this opportunity to pave the way for new EU certification which will be required as and from the end of 2017. The last renovation was carried out in 2006. Lorraine Airport has one member of staff stationed at Luxembourg Airport for the 40 days, supported by a team at Lorraine Airport, the terminal building which is remaining open for ticket sales, its brasserie and welcome desk.
From Lorraine Airport, flights operated by HOP! Air France (to Lyon & Nice), Air Algérie (to Algiers) and Jet Airfly (to Marrahech, Casablance and Lanzarote) will all continue from Luxembourg airport during this period. However, Twin Jet will not be operating its flights from either airport during the renovations.
Johan Vanneste, CEO of Lux-Airport, thanked both Lorraine Airport as well as Luxair, for their flexibility. He presented the airport to the myriad of French journalists present, explaining that it services 70 destinations directly and flew a total of 2.7 million passengers in 2015 via 41,000 commercial flights/month. On the cargo side of its operations, it flew 738,000 tonnes in 2015, making it the 5th largest in Europe.
He said that the current terminal was built in 2008 and confirmed that the new (additional) terminal is expcected to be operational in 2017. This year the passenger terminal has seen a new retail offering, including food and beverage outlets, with the 1st fllor restaurant and self-service to re-open on 1 May. The passenger terminal has space for 7,500 cars (underground, overground, low-cost, kiss-and-fly).
New destinations/airlines this year include HOP! Air France (Lyon), LOT Polish Airlines (Warsaw), Aegean Airlines (Athens) and FlyBe (Manchester from 1 September; Birmingham from 5 September), with Luxair also starting flights to Prague (Czech Republic), Zadar (Croatia) and Almeira (Spain). Last year Luxair was its largest customer (1.69m passengers), with EasyJet 2nd with 198k passengers.
The top destinations of Luxembourg City are: (1) London City, (2) Porto, (3) Munich, (4) Lisbon, (5) Amsterdam, and (6) London Heathrow.
Johan Vanneste admitted that Luxembourg airport will also need work carried out on its runway; however, he feels that it may not be necessary to close the airport as much of the works can be undertaken between 23:00 and 06:00, when few flights operate.
Photo by Geoff Thompson
