Some 25 per cent of the entire UK population, including the whole of London, live just an hour away from Gatwick Airport, and 2.5 million people live half an hour away or less.
Gatwick Airport offers connections to a staggering 800 rail stations, 129 of them directly. It also commands its dedicated junction on the M23 motorway.
The future-planned Gatwick Airport train station upgrade, which is set to see the concourse grow to almost twice the size and enjoy vastly improved accessibility, is also set to enhance the entire passenger experience. Already, the airport offers the best rail access of any major UK airport, with train-to-check-in at the South Terminal taking as little as two minutes.
The station upgrade will see trains running into central London every three minutes; new twice-hourly direct connections to Peterborough and Cambridge; shorter journey times into London compared to Heathrow, and the reach of the network extended to serve more than 150 stations directly. With Gatwick on the Oyster and Contactless payment network, passengers can benefit from seamless connections throughout London.
In 2019, the two-terminal airport served more destinations than any other airport in the UK, with a total of 46.6 million passengers. It competes successfully to win new routes to the UK’s main trading partners, as well as a host of leisure destinations. What’s more, Gatwick is a very community-minded operation, working with local groups across the region and sponsoring many events and organisations, as well as supporting numerous charity partners.
In terms of regional economic contribution, businesses in the Gatwick Diamond zone, stretching from London in the north to Brighton in the south, and from Horsham in the west to East Grinstead in the east, are one and a half times more likely to export then the national average. Further, productivity in the local area is 11 per cent above the national average.