Growth has been going so well that the company is hiring its first ever head of passenger experience. According to the airport’s head of airline relations and marketing, Jesper Klausholm, oversight of the passenger experience has been shared by postholders in areas such as security, handling and others. “Now, for the first time, we have combined the process to have an overall customer experience ambassador,” he confirms.
Just how busy the airport is becoming is demonstrated by new routes, frequencies and traffic across the network. “On the LCC side, both Wizz Air and Ryanair have added services, while among the hub airlines Lufthansa has increased flights to Frankfurt from four to five daily. Then we have airBaltic moving from daily to double-daily with a Q400 to and from Riga and KLM’s rolling 12-month passenger figures just went past 400,000 for the first time ever,” Klausholm reports.
“On their routes to Oslo and Stockholm, SAS and their regional partners have been increasing capacity, while Sun-Air has been very successful in moving to double daily service to London City,” he continues. “In fact, Billund is the only Danish airport with a service to LCY.”
All the extra services build on 2018’s traffic of 3.5 million passengers, 4% up on the previous year. The 2019 figure is forecast to be approximately 3.7 million. “We’re expecting to grow between 4% and 5% a year for the next few years,” Klausholm declares.
While Billund is, of course, the airport closest to the famous Legoland, the percentage of traffic purely heading to the attraction is below 5% of the total. The traffic mainly derives from the fact that the airport serves seven cities in west Denmark, although it isn’t officially attached to any of them.
One of the smallest of the seven is Herning, but here there are large trade halls for exhibitions, a legacy of the city’s days as the centre of Denmark’s textile manufacturing. “The halls also stage major sporting events, so they are another source of traffic,” Klausholm remarks.
