Sion airport upgrades safety status
Wednesday September 8, 2010 - Email this article to a friend

The airport serves the nearby ski resorts of Verbier, Crans-Montana, Zermatt and Saas-Fee.

Villars and Leukerbad are also within reach.

It is closer to them than Geneva or Zurich and can cut a couple of hours off the transfer time.

It is also small and user-friendly, though it is prone to closure as it is surrounded by mountains and therefore susceptible to bad weather.

It can only deal with planes that carry up to 120 passengers.

One UK airline that flies there and has expanded its routes is Snowjet as we have reported here on PlanetSKI.

Stansted to Sion

The new safety certificate, given for snow-clearing, plane defrosting, fire safety and refuelling systems, puts it on a par with the major Swiss airports of Geneva and Zurich.

The airport hope the new staus will therefore attract more business.

The airport currently handles around 30,000 passengers each year.

One of our PlanetSKI readers, Anthony Huysser, has just sent us his thoughts on the new status:

"London, 7 September I was reading an article on your website with much interest, it was the article regarding Sion Airport's upgraded safety status. I'm not an expert but I can only imagine that this would allow them to target more commercial carriers.

Sion may now be particularly suited to low cost carriers such as Ryanair, Easyjet and Baboo. I believe that currently only Snowjet serves Sion from London. However these flights are at impractical days & times. Which is possibly due to Sion's previous safety status / restrictions. There is a considerable market for weekend ski breaks and Sion is a unique and untapped hub for passengers looking to cut travel time from Geneva, avoid Lausanne & Geneva traffic, "Ski all Sunday" and all the inherent benefits from routing through a smaller/regional airport.

It may still be early days but I'm wondering if this is also a matter of encouraging the carriers to consider this route? (Ryanair and Easyjet have no suggestion-boxes listed on their website) Or possibly a suggestion for PlanetSki to put forward to them?

I'm convinced that there is a considerable premium that passengers would be willing to pay for all the benefits and that a new Winter route such as London-Sion would be more than commercially viable".... Regards Anthony Huysser.

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