intuition

Yup. They keep on calling it "all under one roof" but that really means very little when there are several bottlenecks along the way.


I found some info from Finnavia and it seems indeed that:

* South wing adds 3 gates (but loses one or two). New gates will be dual-jet-bridge, unclear if older gates will be converted.

* South wing new finger is mostly a transport area, has moving walkway and does not look to house commercial areas.

* The three new gates will be named 53,54 and 55. Unclear if the old gates (37,38) will be renamed. My speculation is that they will. Then busgates stay as 50 and all jetbridge gates in south wing are beyond the bus terminal and will be numbered 51-55.

* These gates will be the highest numbered gates in the airport, leaving numbers 35-49 open for the future west wing (even though they only have 8 gates planned AFAIK).

* And a tidbit is that free-for-all hot-water-dispensers will be installed to cater to Asian preferences



Anyway, if anyone has more info on upcoming south wing or is participating in the test or are travelling on the day of opening, please post something about that.

intuition

It seems the airport only have 31% transfer passengers, so transfers are perhaps not a priority.

I just found some data from ASQ2016 and other surveys Finavia handed out to "random" people at the airport last year. And with these numbers they are unlikely to think there is a problem:

4,07 out of 5 "Overall satisfaction"
4,14 out of 5 "Waiting time at security"
4,19 out of 5 "Ease of making flight connections"

So they actually rate better in terms on transfers than on overall (unless they cherrypicked what categories they wanted to publish,´)

Ed Size

Are you sure about this? Could be that way the HEL in general, but I guess if you only take a look at the Non-Schengen section the traffic there is mainly generated by AY transfers, and they all have to go through the bottleneck of the passport control. And this is where additional traffic will happen when AY is expanding their long haul fleet.

intuition

It says so in the Finavia Customer Insight 2016 video posted on the official airport youtube channel. (at 25 seconds in) 17,2 million pax, 84% international departures but only 31% transfers.

intuition

Another thing from the video. They claim that:

Only 12% of travellers are "habitual travellers" and value speed and short lines, while 34% of travellers "value shopping and new experiences" so we can all rest assure that commercial areas will always be much higher on Finavias priority than a decent transfer experience...

Ed Size

Make a difference between international and non-schengen - then it may work out (I still doubt).

intuition

Finavia defines transfer as "A transfer passenger arrives by airplane at the airport and continues his or her journey to another airport." so even those busrides to Tammerfors counts!


I agree it sounds low, so I went to https://www.finavia.fi/en/finavia-co...atistics/2016/ to learn more. They don't separate schengen/non-schengen in the stats, but here are 2016 totals:
495625 domestic transfers + 2167418 international transfers / 17184681 total passengers
= 0,1549
Do they double this number to get to "31% transfers"?!?


There is another hint in the video: 50% of airport customers are Finnish, and second largest nationality group is swedish (Germans third). A lot of the Finns and swedish will start or end their trip in HEL and this will keep numbers down.

Jainzar

Plus a big majority of pax outside of OW will likely not connect in HEL. So that drags the number of transfer pax massively down even though AY is dominant at HEL.

r2d2

The total number of passengers includes both departing and arriving passengers. Each transfer passenger will both arrive and depart so doubling the number is correct.

remymartin

An excellent point.

Here are the HEL passenger statistics. https://d31tapn71xsu62.cloudfront.ne...ng-fi52017.pdf

Perhaps someone can map those numbers to the few OW carrier numbers available for confirmation.

Ed Size

Thats correct and it will work fine for schengen flights, but if you look at the non-schengen flights I would estimate that 70% - 80% of the pax are AY pax.

Are there statistics telling you how many pax transfer from schengen to non-schengen?

odo

After south wing opening there will be +-0 situation vs. before. Old 35 and 36 removed and old 38 as part of the south wing.

After the non-schengen expansion is complete, all gates will be dual jet bridges. For illustrations, see Finavia's building permit application attachments from City of Vantaa website: http://paatokset.vantaa.fi/ktwebbin/...2996&version=1

intuition

Excellent info. ^
It looks like current gates 35-37 are to be removed (ie new finger will indeed result in a ±0 situation), but 36 will return again once central plaza is built.


They actually just updated the map hosted at heroku, and there gate 37 have been renamed to 52 and gate 38 has been replaced with new dual jetbridge gate 53.
http://hel-airport-maps.herokuapp.com/?language=en

intuition

I also wonder if they are to lose one gate in the 32-34 area during the construction of central plaza. According to the blueprints 32-34 will be spaced out (to accommodate larger planes) so what is currently gate 34 will actually be to the west of current building.

Also, do note that jetbridges on 32-34 are of a different type, they may not be dual-jetbridges even if the renderings seems to indicate that.

WilcoRoger

I always find funny/sad, how such numbers are misinterpreted. Yeah, 34% is nearly 3x of 12%. But if the 34% flies once a year and the 12% flies every month, the picture is rather different. In this example it would mean that any given day you'd find 4x more "habitual travellers" at the airport then mass tourists.