I think there is definitely potential for business point to point, plus business and leisure connections provided through ticketing is available. LH have some good long haul destinations out of MUC. Leisure travel has got to be a winner, not only does MUC serve the whole of southern Germany, but also western Austria. Ever tried getting a flight to SZG in summer? Well MUC is the answer its only a hop skip and a jump away.
I did precisely that in June. The girlfriend and I spent some time in Southern Germany and Austria. When we were looking for flights, the Ryanair flight from Stansted to Salzburg was so much cheaper than the options from Manchester to Munich that it was a no brainer. Heck, the money we saved on the flights paid for our accommodation for the whole trip. The journey to Stansted was a minor inconvenience but was no more of a "hop, skip and jump" than MUC is to the region we visited. OBVIOUSLY, I am not claiming to be representative of the typical leisure traveller - there will be many people reading this that have a very different outlook towards their travel plans. I am simply pointing out that people carefully consider their many, easily accessible options these days.
Out of interest does the Easyjet price that is 40 cheaper include any checked in baggage? Flybmi auto include this which is quite a big plus in itself. There is then the added cost of travel to and from MAN. Of course there is competition, but every route that operates from LBA is available from a neighbouring airport too. Convenience over cost will work for some but totally agree lets ensure it has some good marketing. My opinion is this is a great route to have, that it will definitely work and I think there will be room for a frequency increase as the route develops. Let's hope flybmi are going to give us more, as is heavily rumoured.
The easyJet price does not include checked baggage. However, the checked baggage option costs £20 more. This still makes it £20 cheaper than the flybmi option. I would also ask the question, How many people take checked baggage these days? Most airlines charge for baggage since the LOCO revolution and this has generally led people to travel very differently. I would suggest that a majority of people on a leisure trip to the Munich region for a few days wouldn't purchase checked luggage given the option thereby making it irrelevant. I would also point out that passengers would not be able to take the same amount of hand luggage on the aircraft to be used on this route making it a NECESSITY to include checked luggage and therefore passengers do not have the option to not pay for it like they do with easyJet.
I also want to assuage this time/cost to MAN argument that gets wheeled out every time the competition is mentioned. Yes, there is a time factor and yes, there is an element of cost. However, there are parts of the LBA catchment area for which time and cost would be broadly the same to both and there are parts of the LBA catchment area for which time and cost are already going to be high and considering MAN (or, indeed, another competitor) is therefore not going to be much more of an inconvenience, if any at all.
For fairness, I did a quick search using the same 8th April date from the centre of Bradford, the centre of Leeds and my home address. It probably won't surprise you to find that the time and cost to MAN from all three is roughly double that of LBA. What may surprise you is that it's only a few quid more expensive (A direct bus from Bradford Interchange to Manchester Airport is only £6). From my home address, even with checked baggage, I would still be saving £16 from MAN if I used the cheapest available public transport. As a rough estimate, let's double that to £32 of savings for a return journey. Let's assume someone goes with me and call it £64. Let's now take the checked baggage option away and call it a saving of £144. Finally, let's consider all of that next to the average cost of a night in a 3 star hotel for two people in Munich which is roughly £150.
OF COURSE, all of the above prices are subject to change and I appreciate that the price savings from public transport will decrease the closer to the date we get but I simply picked the first date of flights from LBA and conducted all of the searches. For the record, using public transport (including transit time) from my home address would take 1h10mins to LBA and 1h59mins to MAN.
I would like to finish by saying that Bmi, in its previous guise, was by far and away the best airline I have used and using LBA is significantly nicer experience than using MAN. There is absolutely no bias in my report on that front.
