Importance of a Hub Airport


Heathrow is the UK’s only major international hub airport.  Hub airports are important because only they have sufficient volume of traffic to offer passengers and freight the wide variety of destinations and frequency of flights needed in today’s globalised world.

Heathrow’s hub status is vital to business and a key component in ensuring that the UK remains internationally competitive in the long-term and at the heart of the international economy, as well as ensuring that the citizens of the UK have direct routes to their family and friends abroad.

Heathrow relies on transfer passengers for the viability of its hub status.  To those who question what value the UK derives from a passenger who flies in from Seattle, changes planes at Heathrow, and flies out again to Bangalore, the answer is surprisingly simple: without transfer passengers, the UK would not have flights to Seattle nor Bangalore.  These routes would simply not be economically viable without the high proportion of transfer passengers that support these flights.  And that is true of many of other flights as well.  Two-thirds of flights at Heathrow depend on 25% - 40% transfer traffic.

Transfer passengers underpin two critical factors – network diversity and frequency.  One of Heathrow’s strengths is its frequency of flights on key business routes compared with other European cities.  In addition, Heathrow offers flights at times of day when no other competitor has flights.  Unsurprisingly, these are critical concerns for business travellers who make up 40 per cent of Heathrow’s originating traffic.  

The evidence around Heathrow’s hub status is clear.  Heathrow accounts for only one-fifth of UK flights but two-thirds of all our long-haul flights.  It operates the UK’s only direct air links to world cities such as Mumbai, Shanghai, Beijing and Sao Paulo. Seven out of the top ten business routes in the world have Heathrow at one end. 

No other airport in the UK can sustain the long-haul routes that Heathrow can.  If airlines could operate profitable, direct long-haul flights from other UK airports then they would.  But, if you look at the long list of destinations served by other UK airports, you would be hard pushed to find a flight east of Dubai or south of the Caribbean.  If airlines can’t fly from Heathrow, they will fly from another international hub instead, taking their business outside of the UK.  

Maintaining Heathrow’s international hub status in not just important for the airport business.  The bigger a network of its direct air routes, the more attractive a city and a country become to domestic business, overseas tourists, and foreign investors seeking locations in which to site their business.  Heathrow is the British economy’s gateway to the world.