Cardiff Airport has been the subject of a great deal of media attention over the last few years, not least because many believe the Welsh Government paid too much for a failing asset. It’s certainly worth looking at passenger figures for Cardiff with reference to those for other airports, to get a sense of how business is developing, and thankfully such data is available from the CAA.
The first chart, below, shows numbers of passengers over the last four years for each of Cardiff, Bristol, Birmingham and Manchester airports. Clicking on any of the airport names in the legend will show/hide the bar chart for that airport.
Of course, absolute numbers of passengers doesn’t tell the whole story, so it’s worth looking at growth in that number from year to year:
For Cardiff Airport, it's clear that 2014-2015 saw significant growth, so it's worth looking further at the number of passengers in each quarter:
With so much growth in Q3 and Q4 - that is, change in passenger numbers - it's worth probing further, and looking at monthly data:
September - November 2015 saw significant growth over those months in 2014. Pinpointing the causes of this is beyond the scope of the visualization, but it's certainly worth noting that the 2015 Rugby World Cup took place during Sept and Oct of 2015, with a number of matches in Cardiff.