In this article, Ultan O’Brian, Chief Revenue Officer of Airportr discusses how off-airport baggage services can help small and mid-sized airports improve passenger flow.
Across Europe, many mid-sized airports are growing faster than much larger hubs with far less room to absorb it. Moving baggage check-in off the airport gives those smaller and regional facilities added capacity that doesn’t rely on costly and long-developing capital programmes.
In 2025, Europe’s airports handled a record 2.6 billion passengers, but that growth landed unevenly. Airports that serve between 10 and 25 million passengers on average saw volumes rise 5.8%, while mega-airports above 40 million grew just 3.5%. Mid-sized and regional airports are taking on passengers faster than the bigger hubs, and they are doing it with fewer check-in desks, less landside floor space and smaller capital budgets to draw on.
Passenger growth outpaces infrastructure investments
Edinburgh Airport spent £5.8 million redesigning its check-in hall and installing 50 self-service kiosks ahead of the 2025 summer season, before serving a record 16.9 million passengers that year, including 61,636 on a single day in July. This phenomenon – demand expanding to fill newly available capacity – is not a new one. But it illustrates the position most fast-growing airports occupy: terminal projects deliver on a timescale measured in years and potentially hundreds of millions of pounds, while passenger growth surges every summer and rarely ebbs year-to-year.
Geneva Airport faces a similar version of the same pressure. Traffic reached 17.85 million passengers in 2025 while aircraft movements fell by around 1%, a product of fuller cabins and larger aircraft. More passengers and more bags now arrive through the same terminal doors on fewer flights, at a site where outward expansion is not feasible. While the massive CAP2030 terminal replacement is stalled, Geneva Airport is investing in a critical area that can have an immediate impact: a new Baggage Logistics Centre that now handles all its bags, with Early Bag Storage for 2,000 pieces following in 2026.
Off-airport baggage can free up valuable terminal capacity
High-impact baggage-related improvements don’t necessitate a Geneva-level investment in new infrastructure. Airportr’s Baggage-as-a-Service model, for example, takes the bag out of the terminal journey, reducing the need for space- and resource-intensive landside activities like curbside handling, queues at the check-in desk and congested bag drop areas.
Through the Airportr service, a passenger has their checked baggage collected from a home, hotel or office, and delivered directly to their flight. The bag enters the airport’s baggage system without ever crossing the departure hall, allowing for predictable and managed baggage ingestion as well as smoother terminal flow. The passenger walks in carrying nothing.
Passenger appetite for that trade is well documented in our research. Seventy-six per cent of travellers with checked baggage want to reach their gate in under 45 minutes, and 67% of Airportr customers name not having to carry heavy luggage through the airport as their reason for booking. Across the network, 92% report an improved travel experience.
A bigger impact for smaller airports
Almost any percentage of passengers that opt for door-to-flight baggage service can have an outsized impact for regional airports. Smaller airports tend to have smaller check-in halls, where even the smallest shift in volume is noticeable. Remove a share of departing bags from a hall of 10 or 20 desks, and the check-in queues shrink significantly, passenger flow-through improves, and the airport operates as it was designed to.
Regional airports also typically have more pronounced volume peaks than their mega-hub counterparts, with short windows of intensive traffic followed by extended periods of underutilisation. This makes baggage solutions that improve throughput during peak hours, by inducing bags earlier outside of the rush period and away from the airport, for example, significantly more impactful for this category of airport.. Larger hubs can plan their way around a difficult peak with spare stands, spare belts and spare people. Smaller airports are working closer to the edge of what they have, which is where an off-airport option pays back fastest.
The network is what makes it repeatable
easyJet has offered Airportr at Gatwick and Geneva since 2023. By the time the service was launched at Edinburgh this summer, with easyJet as the primary airline partner, the logistics infrastructure, technical integrations and deployment processes had already been proven at Frankfurt, Vienna and elsewhere across the network. As a result, Lufthansa and Austrian Airlines were able to follow easyJet and support the Airportr service at Edinburgh within weeks, and with minimal implementation effort.
That is the network effect in action. A growing roster of participating carriers turns off-airport baggage into a plug-and-play proposition rather than a bespoke build, and where several airlines at one airport support the service, the operator can consolidate the induction of all those bags into a single optimised flow. Backing the service then becomes something the airport can offer the airlines it wants to attract, alongside other incentives.
Protecting what smaller airports sell
Ask travellers why they choose a secondary airport over a mega-hub, or choose to connect through a regional airport on a long-haul itinerary, and the answer usually has to do with time savings and convenience.
Growing passenger volume and logistical delays are what eventually erode that advantage. Queues lengthen, bag drop backs up during the morning peak, and an airport that used to feel manageable quickly starts to feel like the one the passenger was trying to avoid.
Off-airport baggage protects that positive passenger experience while volumes climb, which matters commercially as well as operationally, because the ease of departure is part of what keeps a catchment loyal to its local airport rather than driving two hours to a bigger one. Go out and look at your check-in hall and the queues at bag drop. Imagine what they could look like with the extra capacity that comes from off-airport baggage services – and what that would mean for your passengers.
