In message , at
14:50:57 on Thu, 28 Jun 2018, Ding Bat
remarked:
It's not about gates, as people have said. More to do with "per departure".

And the number there is roughly a thousand passengers per staff member
per year, or, to put it another way, each person working at the airport
handles the equivalent of just under three passengers per day, ignoring
freight, which accounts for, at a guess, a quarter of the staff.

1000/ employee/ year if you count passengers twice - when they arrive
and when they depart. For a passenger who both arrives and departs to
have to support 2/3rds of an employee's daily wage seems expensive.
That was the reason for the OP.

What you are forgetting is that the workers are only on-shift a fifth of
the time, so the actual number of passengers handled by each person is
fifteen per shift. (It's a bit of an artificial number because let's say
the x-ray machine operatives are handing many more than that).

I wondered how many passengers per employee were handled by other
airports. Take Stansted airport. I paid 27 pounds to fly from Stansted
to Szczecin on Ryanair. How is the ticket so cheap if it has to cover
a substantial fraction of a worker's daily wage?

The wages are paid from more than just the basic fares box, some of the
baggage handlers will be paid from the drip-down of the extra fees
airlines charge for checked bags, for example. Also the *average* fare
for your Ryanair trip is going to be much higher than the bargain ticket
you bought, and it's the long term average fares box which matters.

Then there's the rents of the shops, paid for by passengers buying
things/hiring cars/changing cash, which feeds through to the airport as
more revenue for all of their wages bill; in the same area advertising
revenue from bill boards within the airport; add to that car parking and
drop-off fees, and tolls for shuttle buses and maybe even taxis.
--
Roland Perry