Leading car hire car broker Economy Car Hire has announced the release of a new fleet of eco-friendly hybrid cars across its UK airport locations, allowing customers easy opportunities to reduce their carbon footprint while avoiding congestion charges in the capital.
Economy Car Hire, which features handy all-inclusive rates with no insurance excesses to eliminate the need for damage and theft loss waiver and expensive collision damage, has declared that the launch is the first step in a series of moves to introduce more environmentally friendly vehicles across its European fleet and ultimately beyond.
The Toyota Prius will be offered, pending its [...]

It seems that airline easyJet will fill the slots at Gatwick Airport, which will be vacated by Aer Lingus later this year. The budge airline is adding three aircrafts to its fleet at Gatwick but has not revealed where they will be flying to.
Aer Lignus, meanwhile, will take two of its Airbus A320’s out of operation and reduce its fleet size to just three at Gatwick. The move will become effective starting at the end of March. The three aircrafts will continue to serve three existing routes to Malaga, Dublin and Knock and a new route to Cork.
Aer Lingus has [...]

It now seems that the new owners of Gatwick Airport are set to eliminate long check ins and security queues as a top priority of taking control. As of right now, Gatwick Airport is the second largest airport in all of Britain.
Global Infrastructure Partners, is the company that is set to buy Gatwick Airport for £1.5 billion. The deal is set to be closed by the end of this week. It is just subject to European Commission approval, but experts are not worried about the deal going through.
The company went on to say that it wants to deploy a team [...]

The move by Global Infrastructure Partners (GIP) to purchase Gatwick Airport has been met with mixed response but the group has promised to make extensive improvements.
Already the owners of London City Airport, GIP has promised passengers and improved airport experience after announcing their purchase for £1.51 billion of the world’s busiest single runway airport.
According to GIP they will modernise and upgrade the airport and hope to transform the airport experience for leisure and business travellers alike. The group has pointed to their success in operating London City airport as an indicator of their commitment and has claimed that they will [...]

www.gatwickairport.com
Earlier this year, the British Airports Authority (BAA) was ordered that it must sell off some of its airports in order to break up its monopoly. Among the airports that had to be sold, Gatwick Airport was one of them. Now this airport is being auctioned off, and it looks like it may fetch as little as £1.3 billion. The BAA was hoping that the airport would pull in £2 billion at the least.
The report that was done on Gatwick Airport last year showed that it was worth £1.33billion and £1.73billion as of last December. Now, due to the slump [...]

Two out of the 5 parties interested in bidding for the Gatwick Airport have pulled out of the bidding only 6 weeks before the final bids are due, which poses a problem for Ferrovial, the majority owner of the airport.
On Monday, Babcock and Brown and RREEF, the infrastructure fund of Deutsche Bank, confirmed that they were pulling out of the bidding despite having submitted a non-binding, indicative bid during January.  The group has been hit with financial issues from the parent group of Babcock & Brown in Australia.
The consortium led by 3i is now considered to be out of [...]

Hochtief, a German construction giant, has withdrawn their bid from the £2 billion auction of the Gatwick Airport, which is owned by the British Airports Authority, only leaving 5 bidders entering the second round. Analysts think that bids for the airport, which is the second largest airport in Britain, may increase to as much as £2 billion, even though others in the industry question if it will get that high amid the current credit crisis.
Robert Crimes, a Credit Suisse Group analyst, said on January 19th that the sale of the Gatwick Airport would generate nearly £2 billion for the [...]

Concerns that the current economic crisis would mean that holidaymakers would stay at home during the Christmas season were confirmed when the British Airports Authority, the largest airport operator in Britain, reported that their passenger numbers dropped by 6.9% during the month of December in comparison to last year.
The Gatwick Airport saw the biggest fall in traffic, where it fell by 13.8%, which is partly due to the move of some of the airport’s transatlantic flights to the London Heathrow Airport, along with the collapse of Zoom Airlines, which dealt specifically with North American services. The Stansted Airport witnessed [...]

Gatwick Airport could possibly see a second runway expansion rather than Stansted Airport or Heathrow Airport with secret plans being created by the companies who are bidding to purchase the second biggest airport in Britain. On Wednesday of last week, the Competition Commission supported the idea effectively, calling on the government to change their aviation policy. Their statement threatens to reveal state policy during a period when the Cabinet is having a dispute over building a 3rd runway at the Heathrow Airport.
If Gatwick Airport is to have an expansion, as many as 300 homes would be destroyed. [...]

The Competition Commission said yesterday that the British Airports Authority should be made to sell two more of their airports in the United Kingdom, one in London along with Gatwick Airport and another in Scotland. Pending a final decision to occur in March, they believe that they should have to sell Gatwick Airport and Stansted Airport in London, as well as Edinburgh Airport in Scotland. They didn’t set a timetable for the sale of the properties as of yet.
Colin Matthews, the Chief Executive of the British Airports Authority, said that they will continue to fight the forced sale. [...]