The Amsterdam Schiphol Airport team was busy at Routes explaining how next year’s capacity reductions will impact its airline customers
Compared to their airport peers in the halls and meetings rooms in Istanbul, Amsterdam Schiphol’s Aviation Partnerships team were delivering a significantly different message to their airline and destination partners.
Their message is the opposite to the usual one of adding capacity and network expansion. It is about reducing capacity.
“We have been explaining that the independent slots co-ordinator [for Schiphol] will start asking all airlines to reduce their slots by 3-4% for summer 2024,” said Joery Strijtveen, Head of Aviation Partnerships at Schiphol.
The prospect of capacity reductions at Amsterdam was first mooted last year, but “now it is real,” said Strijtveen. The airport’s official capacity declaration states that there is room for a maximum of 280,645 flights in the 2024 summer season (31 March to 26 October 2024). That’s around 12,400 fewer flights than in the summer of 2023.
This is because Schiphol has taken the maximum of 460,000 flights in a full operating year (summer and winter) into account. This figure has been set out in the government’s experimental scheme, which puts an end to anticipatory enforcement.
The journey to a capacity cut at Schiphol is a complex one, with various legal challenges including from IATA, but essentially the Dutch Government is seeking to reduce the number of flight movements at the airport from 500,000 to 452,500 per year. The reduction will take place in two steps with the interim capacity initially falling to 460,000 as of summer 2024.
“I think the benefit of being here with our team of five is that we are giving some context to all the airlines,” said Strijtveen. “Sometimes what you hear is very much hearsay, or you read something in Dutch through Google Translator, and you won’t get the full detail,” said Strijtveen.
To ensure clear communications with airlines, Schiphol has asked the Dutch government to issue all its announcements in English and offered to send through all relevant government updates to ensure good engagement with the aviation community, he noted.
It is easy in such a strange and complicated situation for airlines to be confused. “One airline I spoke to here at the show had heard about a potential night closure and thought they would be impacted,” said Strijtveen. “But we know the detail, what time they fly, and we could reassure them they would not be impacted.”
Schiphol understands airline objections to the Dutch government’s decision, and fears about the capacity reduction becoming one that sets a precedent for other airports. “We also say to airlines this first phase of the reduction is very much a legal matter,” said Strijtveen.
“This is not just the government fighting against aviation,” he said. “If the government doesn’t solve these legal issues, we might end up with even lower capacity.” And from our legal perspective, that’s a real threat.”
While the capacity cuts are a tough message to deliver, it is a debate underway at many other western hubs, noted Strijtveen. “There’s a big discussion about it, not maybe to the extent that Schiphol is doing it now, and the precedent it might set. I think it will start in Western Europe and it will spill over – if not now, then within a couple of years.”
Schiphol is seeking to make the best of a difficult situation. “We respect the government’s decision to do this, and it’s quite a bold one,” said Strijtveen. The capacity reduction plan is based on noise abatement and reduction, although from Schiphol’s perspective “the number of flights doesn’t tell everything about noise,” said Strijtveen.
“That’s why we’ve been successfully lobbying on creating a system where you would incentivise, or punish, based on noise and maybe even CO2 in the future, but start with noise first,” he explained.
It is an airline’s commercial decision on how it reduces its capacity at Schiphol, but for the airport the priority is “protecting connectivity at Schiphol, which is critical for the Netherlands,” said Strijtveen. The airport is already seeing some airlines up-gauging aircraft types to better use their slots. For instance, Turkish has gone from narrowbodies to Boeing 777s and A330s for its services to Schiphol.
For 2023 Schiphol is expecting around 60 million passengers, up from 52.5 million in 2022, but well down still from the high point of 71.7 million in 2019.
