Morten Mortensen, senior director of airline sales and route development at Copenhagen Airport (CPH), speaks to Routes.

What are the major recent successes at your organisation?

It has been quite a difficult summer across European airports. I think that the return of traffic and a large growth in passengers urging to go on vacation, came faster and stronger than both airlines and airports had imagined. Simply put staffing up was too slow to cater for the demand. I’m very pleased, that after a challenging start early in the summer, as an airport we did quite well in operating the airport; in check-in, security, operations overall. In a very good cooperation with our airline partners, we successfully managed through the summer.

From a network and route perspective, I believe that we have successfully rebuilt the most attractive passenger destinations and airline routes. It is fantastic to welcome our airline partners back—most of our airlines have rebuilt their earlier connections.

What are your main strategic ambitions in the short-, medium- and long-term?

In the short-term we are working to get through was looks like a challenging winter across Europe. Coming out of the pandemic, regretfully we see dark clouds ahead with risk of economic recession and dropping passenger demand. So, for the short-term, we will work closely with our airlines to manage through the winter and into next summer. In the medium-term, we are aiming to rebuild the passenger flows to what resembles pre-COVID 2019 numbers. Hopefully our main airline customers will come out strong and will continue to focus on growing out of Copenhagen. In the long-term, I am hopeful that the terrible situation with the war in Ukraine will end, and with that a reopening of the Russian airspace. With the we should see a full rebuilding of out airline network from Copenhagen to China and the rest of Asia.

What is your main goal in attending Routes World 2022?

We are looking forward to the aviation industry to once again gather face-to-face at a Routes conference. Hopefully we will also again see participants from Asia, perhaps even China. Our main goals for Routes World 2022 is to progress with a number of promising business cases, both intercontinental as well as regional European. We will again host a stand, where we hope to see our many friends and partners for a chat and one of our famous freshly made juices by Joe & the Juice.