Inverness Airport handled 4,900 passengers at the weekend, breaking the previous record 4,400 passenger total set over the weekend of 2 and 3 July.

A combination of scheduled and charter flights saw the Highlands’ hub airport handle 2,300 passengers on Saturday 9 and 2,600 on Sunday 10 July.

The soaring passenger numbers were due to the introduction of new daily services to Belfast and Bristol at the beginning of July and holiday charter flights over the weekend to and from Majorca, Verona and Zurich.

easyJet’s new Belfast service started on 1 July and the Bristol service on 7 July. The low-cost carrier is also operating an extra return flight on its daily Luton service on Saturdays and Sundays throughout the summer.

More than 330 scheduled flights operate every week between Inverness and London (Gatwick, Heathrow and Luton), Belfast, Birmingham, Bristol, Manchester, Edinburgh, Glasgow, the Northern and Western Isles. These are operated by British Airways (BA CitiExpress and franchise partner Loganair), bmi, easyJet, Eastern Airways and Highland Airways.

The airport’s busiest summer ever means that car parking at the airport is under pressure and people planning to travel over the holiday period are being asked to consider making alternative arrangements to leaving their cars at the airport.

An additional 85 car parking spaces are currently under construction and will be available by the end of July. The airport currently has 550 on site paid for parking spaces.

Inverness Airport Manager James Walton said: “We broke all records this weekend with almost 5,000 people travelling through the airport. It is excellent to see that the established and new scheduled services are being well used and that more people are choosing to take holiday charter flights direct from their local airport.

“We expect that July 2005 will be our busiest month ever on record and that the passenger growth over the coming months will bring us to an operating year total of circa 700,000 passengers – more than double the airport’s total for six years ago.

“The growth also strengthens our business cases to airlines to introduce new routes and services that will benefit the region, its communities and economy,” said Mr Walton.

ENDS