Business Travel Just 22% of UK Aviation

Business Travel Just 22% of UK Aviation

Summary

AEF has carried out an analysis of CAA (Civil Aviation Authority) statistics on the purpose of flights. Our analysis shows that only about 22% of flights at UK airports are for business.

Method

Each year the CAA carries out a survey at a number of airports, taking a representative sample of passengers at each airport. The reports are published on the CAA web site[i]. There are separate tables for each airport, but the CAA does not sum or combine the data to give results for the UK as whole. This AEF analysis does that.

The CAA surveys the largest airports every year and the smaller airports over a cycle of several years. In order to pick up the great majority of air travel we used CAA reports from 2012 back to 2009.

Where an airport is surveyed every year, we have used the survey from 2012. Where an airport is not surveyed every year, we use the latest survey of 2011, 2010 and 2009. This means that the overall figures are hybrids of 2012 to 2009. But in practice the 2012 statistics dominate so, for all practical purposes, the results can be regarded as applying to 2012.

The CAA statistics used are Table 19 – “Journey purpose by flight type and country of residence”. The purposes are “business” which is split into 16 sub-categories and “leisure” split into 15 sub-categories. (Leisure includes holidays and visiting friends and family.) These splits are not considered further. There are 4 classes of traveller: UK person on a domestic flight, foreigner on a domestic flight, UK person on an international flight and foreigner on an international flight.

Results

The percentage of trips undertaken for business is just 22%. A breakdown is given overleaf. The overall figure of 22% conceals quite big differences between subsets of the data which separate out domestic from international flight and flights by UK from foreign passengers. For example, the proportion of UK business passengers on international flights is just 14%.

Comparison with other statistics

A figure used by government and industry to illustrate the proportion business travel isapproximately 25%. This uses premium class travel as a proxy rather thanthe CAA statistics used here and it is undoubtedly less reliable.

A survey separate from the CAA one is carried out by the Office of National Statistics (ONS) called ‘Travel Trends’. This shows, among others, the proportions of visits by air to the UK by foreigners and by UK residents abroad. Combining these, the proportion of business trips is 16%.

Because of differences in sampling methods and categorisations in the CAA and ONS survey, some difference in results are to be expected. In particular, the ONS results probably omit domestic flights. If only international flights are considered, the CAA survey gives a figure of 19% business. The ONS survey also contains an appreciable “miscellaneous” category and it possible that some of this category would map across to CAA’s business categories.

Significance of results

The main argument used by the aviation industry and other supporters of airport expansion is the economic benefits resulting from more business travel. These results show that the proportion of business trips is actually quite small. There is enough capacity at UK airports to cater for any conceivable growth in business travel.

The main reason why airport expansion is said to be needed is in fact because of leisure flying, increasingly low cost flights. There is a range of policy options which would ensure that even if no new runways were built, there would be no appreciable adverse impacts on business trips or the economy.

Detailed results

The percentages of business trips for the UK are as follows.

Note.1 The figures actually relate to trip ends, not flights or trips. The distinction arises because an international flight has only one end in the UK whereas a domestic flight has two. A domestic flight will therefore appearin the statistics twice or will have a double chance of being sampled. If an allowance is made for this, the % of business flights reduces to 20.8%.
Note 2. It is possible that the Olympics in 2012 made the results atypical. An equivalent analysis, made from 2011 data back to 2009, gives a business % of 22.7%

The percentages of business flights by airport are as follows.

Note. See notesafter previous table.

AEF / NF / Oct 2013

[i] See for example