William Pearson became the new CCO at Regional & City Airports (RCA) in September 2018, having spent the majority of the previous 10 years in senior aviation development roles at both Manchester and Birmingham airports. anna.aero’s Chief Analyst met with the new CCO during a visit to Bournemouth in December, one of four airports owned by RCA.
Regional & City Airports (RCA) is part of the Rigby Group and owns the UK regional airports at Bournemouth, Coventry, Exeter and Norwich. It has management contracts to run the airports at Blackpool, City of Derry and Solent Daedalus. RCA has also established the XLR Executive Jet Centres, fixed-base operator (FBO) business, with centres currently located at Birmingham, Exeter and Liverpool. William Pearson became RCA’s new Chief Commercial Officer in September 2018 and brings a wealth of experience to the organisation, having spent most of the previous 10 years in senior aviation development roles at Manchester and Birmingham airports. anna.aero’s Chief Analyst Nick Preston met with the new CCO at Bournemouth Airport, RCA’s most recent acquisition, to discuss Pearson’s plans and how he aims to drive growth across its airport portfolio.
William Pearson: “Regional airports can provide domestic and international connectivity which is important because it supports jobs and economic activity in the local regions, along with skilled labour forces. Bournemouth, where we are today, is the epitome of a good regional airport. It has a large catchment population and it’s got a good economic base behind it. Bournemouth already supports international connectivity. Domestic connectivity is also very important at regional airports generally. If you take Exeter as an example, the domestic connectivity is extremely important to that airport, and the airports it connects to. Nobody’s going to realistically drive from Exeter to Glasgow for a meeting. If airports don’t support domestic connectivity, those meetings aren’t going to happen. From an international connectivity perspective, and I’m not just talking about outbound leisure travellers, but also inbound visitors, the aspiration is to offer connectivity via large international hubs. We’ve got that set-up now at Exeter and Norwich, where we’ve got connections to the likes of Paris, Amsterdam and Manchester, which are important hubs for us. That allows people to connect through these hubs into our airports and more importantly the regions.
RCA owns the airports at Bournemouth, Coventry, Exeter and Norwich which are highlighted in red in the above location graphic. The group also has management contracts to run the airports at Blackpool, City of Derry and Solent Daedalus (highlighted in blue). Bournemouth, Exeter and Norwich account for the vast majority of passenger traffic among RCA’s airport portfolio.
WP: “The benefit of having a group of airports is that costs are spread across multi-site locations. This makes things cheaper at the individual airport level, provided you have the right people at group level overseeing all the component parts. We already have a lot of synergies within the business. We’ve got a group CEO, a group CCO, and group finance, marketing, aviation development and commercial development functions. This structure works very well. We can also leverage our group synergies to build multi-level relationships with customers, such as airlines and commercial suppliers, across all our airports. These centralised relationships are efficient for us, but also allow airlines to see us as a larger component. The collective is greater than a single airport, and that’s important. We approach our commercial relationships with our in-terminal suppliers in the same way. We plan to expand airline relationships across the group of airports. Where one of RCA’s airports already has a relationship with an airline or commercial suppliers of catering, food and beverage and duty free etc, its better for us to have those relationships collectively, because those suppliers then see us as a more important part of their business.
WP: “Small regional airports are about sustainable business and about making sure that we’re there for the long term. We also need to make sure that we deliver the service and the customer experience that passengers need and deserve when they are choosing to use one of the smaller airports rather than travelling some distance to go to a larger airport. It’s about making sure there are no long queues for passengers at check-in or at any other part of their journey, and that they have a great experience when using any of our facilities. This doesn’t only apply to passengers but to the airlines themselves. When airlines are receiving services like catering or fuelling etc, we need them to know that we are going to do everything within our power to make sure that aircraft gets away on time with the service level that they’re expecting and deserve. This approach is essential to ensure that customers continue to use our airports and that we become the airport of choice for those passengers and subsequently encourage further airlines to use our airports.
“We already plan to bring handling in-house at Bournemouth from 1 April 2019. We’ve got experience of how to do it. We already have a handling business at two of our other airports that has all the knowledge base we need in terms of procurement, operational best practices, contracting etc. It makes commercial sense to bring handling in-house at Bournemouth, but it also makes customer service sense. We want customers to have a great experience enjoying the facilities we’ve got here.
WP: “The airports that we own are all in attractive locations in the southern half of the UK. The reason I joined RCA is because I believe there is a great opportunity to develop these airports. They have plenty of runway capability right now. We don’t necessarily need to build new runways to continue to develop the UK passenger infrastructure. We’ve done our homework on where we think the opportunities lie for our businesses and our airports. We know where customers want to travel to and from and we’re already putting a huge amount of effort into that. My ambition is to make sure that passengers can have the connectivity that they want and are asking for regularly, available from their local airport. We’ve got a strong passenger base and a strong demand case, and we are going to represent that to the airlines.
Pearson and Preston discussed RCA’s ambitions for growing passenger numbers across its airport portfolio. “The airports that we own are all in attractive locations in the southern half of the UK. The reason I joined RCA is because I believe there is a great opportunity to develop these airports.” explained Pearson.