The centrally located German airport has space for safe passenger processing, including social distancing.
Location. location, location. It’s all important for so many businesses. Münster/Osnabrück Airport (FMO) in Germany has a fair distance between it and other major cities except perhaps Dortmund, real advantage in terms of catchment, as Detlef Döbberthin, airport manager–aviation marketing notes.
“People from this most populated area of Germany can reach our airport in 60-90 minutes by car; those from nearby Lower-Saxony and The Netherlands can reach us very rapidly. A whole range of customers – business travellers, tourists and ethnic passengers – from these areas are using our airport,” Döbberthin reports.
Although the airport offers important business routes, the airlines serving FMO are mainly charter and low-fare carriers. Considering whether this will be advantageous after the pandemic – with people likely to be wanting a holiday – Döbberthin remarks, “It will depend on the lifted travel restrictions outside the EU as 25% of all passengers are travelling between FMO and Turkey as a result of tourism and ethnic demand. In case of the intra-EU routes it depends on the stability of the carriers and tour operators serving these routes. But in general yes, charter and low-cost routes are likely to be back earlier than business routes, especially in the upcoming summer holiday period.”
Space at the airport is another benefit, particularly for safe passenger processing including social distancing. “Our terminal building has the capacity for roughly three million passengers annually, and we had slightly below one million last year. That means with an occupation of around a third of the capacity, our airport is the perfect location for passengers to travel safely with all those social distancing rules, compared to larger airports which are more crowded in normal times,” Döbberthin confirms with a note of enthusiasm.
