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rute, når afgifterne blev en realitet (ID-nummer 220), men
en mulig fremtidig Femern-forbindelse kunne til gengæld
få negative konsekvenser for driften.
39. Omlægningen til flyvning på lufthavnen i Luton vil
sandsynligvis blot få positive konsekvenser for de danske
rejsende, idet der fra Luton er bedre forbindelse til det cen-
trale London, end det var tilfældet for Stansted.
Summary
In the autumn of 2002, DFDS carried out a far-reaching
restructuring of the ferry route between Esbjerg and Har-
wich. DFDS abandoned a concept, which until then had
focused on the ferry journey as an experience in itself,
including all the passenger comforts of a normal hotel stay.
By replacing the Dana Anglia – the old passenger ferry on
the route – with a new ship, the Dana Sirena , the route was
now aiming at a ro/pax system, that is, the integration of
passengers and goods on the same ship. From then on,
freight was to play a much greater role on the route.
Although the restructuring was in itself part of a larger re-
organisation of DFDS’s activities, the opening of a new
Ryanair route between Esbjerg and London Stansted in
May 2001 was seen as an important reason for the final
downturn of the ferry route.
In the light of these developments, a project team from
the Centre for Maritime and Regional Studies (The Fishe-
ries and Maritime Museum/University of Southern Den-
mark) set out to document the changes in the transport pat-
tern between Esbjerg and England. The documentation was
to be part of a larger research project concerning the histor-
ical structural changes in West Jutland in modern times.
Starting in September 2002 with a documentation trip on
the Dana Anglia, which was followed a year later by a
similar trip on the Dana Sirena, the team began documen-
ting the process of change on the ferry route. However, it
soon proved to be of interest to extend the research to inclu-
de the development in a competing means of transport such
as the low fare Ryanair route between Esbjerg and Stansted.
This work was carried out from 2002 to 2004, and the
results are the subject of this report. Amongst other things
the team aimed at documenting the knock-on economic
effect of each mode of transport. This involved evaluating
the effect of the changes in the passenger flow to Esbjerg
and the local region as well as of the miscellaneous delive-
ries of goods and services necessary for the running of each
transport route itself.
The Ryanair route was of special interest because at the
time of its opening it had been hailed as the saviour of
Esbjerg’s publicly run airport. The airport had been a natio-
nal airport, but had lost its passenger basis with the com-
pletion of the bridge over the Great Belt in 1997. Since
then, attempts had been made to establish the airport as an
international airport, but without much luck. For this reason
the contract with Ryanair gave rise to big expectations - not
only in the airport itself but also among local politicians in
the city council, which finances the airport, as well as
among the local tourist industry. The route did prove a
major success with a passenger turnover of 100,000 after
little more than a year in operation. It proved an inspiration
for entrepreneurship in Esbjerg - but it soon also came
under attack for being anti-competitive. The criticism was
made by the international and privately-owned airport in
Billund, and centred on the fact that Ryanair paid less than
half as much in passenger fees as other airlines. Conside-
ring all the different interests at stake, it seemed relevant to
establish some idea of the overall effects of the route for the
region.
Focusing first on the effects of the passenger flow, an
interview team, over a period of a year, interviewed more
than two hundred passengers waiting in Esbjerg airport to
board the plane for London. The answers, which were
derived using a standardised questionnaire, were then
recorded in a database together with the answers from the
passengers on the ferries Dana Anglia and Dana Sirena.
This made it easier to compare and highlight differences in
the passengers’ purposes in travelling, their geographical
spread, and their spending habits.
The research revealed some interesting information.
Firstly, less than a third of the Ryanair passengers travelling
to Denmark actually had the local area as their destination.
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