Host Welcome: Budapest Airport
Transcript
Chris Dinsdale:Hi everyone. Klaudi, I have to tell you, after being here for 18 years, your Hungarian is pretty much better than mine, and so I just need to make sure my wife doesn't hear that. So, dear guests and dear colleagues, on behalf of the Budapest Airport, I'm absolutely delighted to welcome such esteemed guests from the aviation sector. We are really honored to have you here. We spent years preparing for this, and we just are so excited to show off our city. We all know that the aviation, aviation industry in the last 2 years has had a very difficult time. We've had the coronavirus pandemic, followed by that, quite a difficult recovery. Last summer, we saw this recovery and the handling of the returning traffic, and it was challenging. This challenge was not only for the airlines, but of course for ground handlers and for airports. And this is something that we can't allow to happen again. But I'm confident that all these issues and difficulties will be resolved before the summer season. The aviation industry has taken quite a heavy reputational hit. last summer. And this is something that we at the Budapest Airport, we believe in acting as an ecosystem. We believe that every part of this value chain affects each other and that we're only as strong as our weakest link. At the Budapest Airport, we need and we believe in acting as this ecosystem, and thus any airlines or any partners that we have at our airport will always have a ready partner in us. Before the pandemic, the Budapest Airport handled about 16 million passengers. Last year, on the road to recovery, we handled about 12 million passengers, and this year in 2023, we expect about 14 million passengers. So we've been very happy with this recovery. We see this as a strong destination, both for our tourism but also for business. We expect that next year that we'll achieve our 2019 numbers and therefore increase after that. During the long, quiet months of COVID we've taken the time to develop the Budapest Airport's long-term strategy, and we asked ourselves some pretty fundamental questions: where were we and where did we want to go? And we also took this time to prepare for the inevitable recovery. We wanted to make sure that when the time came, we were raring to go and we had everything in order. Unsurprisingly, one of the main pillars of our strategy is around quality, as you'd expect. But of course, quality needs to be balanced to ensure that we have an environment where airlines and all of our partners are able to achieve their goals within our ecosystem. Both financially and operationally. So there's a fine balance here. 2 years later, I'm delighted to announce that last week we've won the award for the best European airport in the 15 million to 25 million category. And just yesterday, we won the best airline in Eastern Europe from Skytrax. These awards, of course, are only possible because of our ecosystem. Because of the airlines that operate out of us, and also all the ground handlers that have worked very hard at our airport, and all the 250 companies that are in our ecosystem. I think also within this context, it was very important for us after winning these awards to make sure that our airlines and our partners continue to flourish, and that is what we're seeing at the Budapest Airport as numbers increase. Our long-term strategy also focuses on sustainability and terminal capacity enhancement. Here, we have made significant inroads into our net-zero roadmap. We had a 2050 deadline. This is now down to under 2035. We believe that as an airport, we need to do our part within this sector. It'll take longer for airlines to get there, so airports need to lead. We also have focused on expanding our quite limited terminal capacity. But we want to do this in a phased approach to make sure that we meet the demand, but also not to overbuild. We need to be competitive on the market. With our strategy pillars focusing on quality, sustainability, and terminal expansion, our airport is certainly a great fit for all the airlines. Therefore, I really encourage you, please take the time, walk around this beautiful city, walk around and meet our wonderful people. The city in this region has so much to offer, and we look forward to many of you leaving here with an excited feeling, wanting to start a new route to our beautiful city. So I wish you all a very good conference and a successful few days. Thank you.
Copyright policy: All transcripts on this site are the copyright of CAPA - Centre for Aviation. Our reproduction policy is as follows: you may quote up to 400 words of any transcript on the condition that you attribute the transcript to CAPA - Centre for Aviation and link to the original video page. All other use is prohibited. While we aim for 100% accuracy in the transcript, there may be some minor transcribing errors.