Lux-Airport announces 800 additional parking spots

Luxair alone is expecting 3 million passengers by 2030. However, issues have been raised about the facility's ability to keep pace with recent growth.

In a parliamentary question, CSV's Laurent Mosar described the airport's car park as a disaster, to which the DP Minister of Mobility Yuriko Backes replied that the number of car parks had increased slightly in recent years, but admitted that there was still room for improvement.

In another RTL interview, Lux-Airport's CEO Alexander Flassak announced that 800 additional parking spots had just become available this week.

15 per cent of the parking spaces will be available for people without a reservation, although the airport still recommends booking in advance.

Bottlenecks at Lux-Airport

While the additional 800 parking spots should hopefully make the facility's car park bottlenecks a thing of the past, the airport continues to recommend that passengers plan to arrive at the airport two hours before departure.

Unfortunately, incidents in which regular passengers cannot get into the car park do occur, despite having a reservation — to which Flassak replies:

"In that case, we can only recommend rewatching the instruction videos and ensuring the barcode is facing upwards, and if that doesn't work either, ask the service desk instead of taking another ticket."

Additionally, more patience has been requested from both passengers and employees:

"At the moment, the roundabout is the bottleneck — due to all the roadworks and traffic lights that have been added by the tram construction site. Of course, we're very happy about the tram that will serve the airport at the beginning of next year, but at the moment we really have a lot of traffic due to all the roadworks, especially at peak times."

Luxair is 'ready for summer'

Luxair, the main airline of Findel Airport, transports half of the facility's passengers and expressed its satisfaction with the current system. 38,000 passengers flew with Luxair last week, the first week of the holidays, without any major problems — which is a good start to the summer, says Luxair's commercial director, Thomas Fischer.

"Of course you can see the current construction sites, which are visible to everyone, but this is only temporary — we have not noticed any particular problems from our customers or from the employees at the airport and assume that there will be none this summer either."

In related news, security lines are now moving faster than they were two years ago. In her parliamentary response, Backes explained that 75 per cent of passengers currently need less than 5 minutes to complete security checks, while 95 per cent of passengers take less than 15 minutes to pass through security.

Projects after the holidays

After the summer, waiting times should also become more transparent, says Flassak:

"We will be setting up orientation displays to make things easier, which will also show waiting times, which queues are best to take and where it takes the shortest time, among other things."

Luxair expects to grow from 2.5 million to 3 million passengers by 2030. The airport expects slightly steady growth in general — although the numbers have not been shared publicly.

CEO Alexander Flassak is confident that the airport will be able to cope with this growth:

“We still have possibilities to optimise the terminals themselves, but of course in the long term the expansion of the airport is unavoidable, as the Minister already mentioned. We want to provide the infrastructure that is required for the expected growth, knowing that there is still room for adaptation and optimisation in the building. Some functions will be moving into the Skypark, which means we have space available that we can make available to passengers. We will look at further options after the summer vacation.”