Archive Flybe at Cardiff Airport

[TheLocalYokel]

Seen the article now in Wales Online about it. Blames APD and barely mentions the passenger numbers! Maybe the Welsh government can use the loss to get APD devolved to Wales. Maybe as well a 'rescue' deal from the Welsh Government is possible as well.
http://www.walesonline.co.uk/business/business-news/airline-flybe-scrapping-cardiff-airport-13452339

I guess the argument about bringing back or bringing in routes if APD was reduced or abolished applies to all airlines at every airport.

It is somewhat sad but you have to get bums on seats in sufficient numbers to make it work. However on a very positive note I travelled through the airport on board Flybe's flight to Rome and I have to say i am most impressed with Flybe and its route to Rome. The flight was full both ways and the service on board was exemplary . I haven't flown from cardiff for a few years and I am impressed with the improvements made. Personally I think the size of aircraft really suits Cardiff and other routes to Southern Europe certainly should work. I'm surprised that neither Ryanair or vueling haven't started the route to Rome earlier tbh .

Has BRS lost one of its customers, Marko?🙂

 

[Marko1]

I guess the argument about bringing back or bringing in routes if APD was reduced or abolished applies to all airlines at every airport.

Has BRS lost one of its customers, Marko?🙂

 

[Marko1]

No not at all LY. The flights were booked back last autumn to connect with a cruise and my usual airline has this very annoying policy of not releasing a full summer schedule in one go. I have to say I was impressed though with Flybe. I wish they stayed when they took over Baconnect. Anyway I will pass through my fav airport on October on our way to Paris and is certainly looking forward to seeing the recent changes

 

[Jerry]

Glad you enjoyed your CWL experience Marko! Hope you use the airport again in the future!
I have been hearing that the Rome flight is doing well and the CDG flight as well. Though I don't think Vueling will look at it maybe Ryanair will be tempted by it the future. Maybe to Campiano?

 

[TheLocalYokel]

No not at all LY. The flights were booked back last autumn to connect with a cruise and my usual airline has this very annoying policy of not releasing a full summer schedule in one go. I have to say I was impressed though with Flybe. I wish they stayed when they took over Baconnect. Anyway I will pass through my fav airport on October on our way to Paris and is certainly looking forward to seeing the recent changes

I've always found that daft (late release of latter part of summer dates by easyJet, not you using CWL😆). Something that Flybe can capitalise on and have done in your case. It's always good to have another option.

I only flew with Flybe twice - apart from a trip to Salzburg on a charter flight (Bae 146) in their British European days between Jersey European and Flybe - BRS-IOM-BRS after they had pulled out of BRS over BACon in 2007. They returned for two separate periods but could never get BRS-IOM to work in the way they did when they were Jersey European a decade beforehand. We had a Q400 which was fine for that sort of trip. I had nothing whatever to complain about with my experience. It was sound and the very young cabin crew (one male, one female) on the return leg were excellent in very trying flight conditions (significant turbulence).

 

[Jerry]

I guess the argument about bringing back or bringing in routes if APD was reduced or abolished applies to all airlines at every airport.

Probably more so though at smaller airport's that struggle to attract airlines and routes especially if their catchment area is overlapped by other airports which does happen a lot in the UK. If APD was cut for airports below say the 3 million passengers mark then that might encourage airlines like Easyjet and Ryanair to look at smaller airport's and provide a more local service.

Hopefully Flybe will look at another route instead. MAN for instance might be more sustainable in the long term.

 

[TheLocalYokel]

We'll see what happens after Brexit when the EU competition rules won't apply although lip service might still have to be paid to them if any sort of reasonable deal is made between the UK and EU.

 

[TheLocalYokel]

Talk elsewhere again (and we've discussed on F4A too in the past) about the efficacy of a CWL-MAN route, primarily I suppose to connect with Flybe's routes from there.

I've done some checking and I hope this is correct and Flybe operates the following routes from MAN:

Aberdeen
Amsterdam
Dusseldorf
Edinburgh
Exeter
Hannover
Jersey
Knock
Lyon
Milan MXP
Newquay
Paris CDG
Southampton
Toulouse

with seasonal routes to

Chambery
Innsbruck
La Rochelle
Luxembourg
Nantes
Rennes

Furthermore, Glasgow will begin on 1 September operated for Flybe by Eastern, and Isle of Man and Southend will begin on 29 October operated for Flybe by Stobart.

I've typed existing Flybe routes from CWL in bold. Both Aberdeen and Amsterdam are operated by other airlines from CWL.

I'm not sure how many people would want to fly from CWL to NQY or SOU or EXT via MAN (some might of course) and, as indicated by the bold typeface, some of the routes already offer direct routing from CWL. That said MAN probably has a greater spread of days and frequency on some of these routes.

Nevertheless, there seem enough options for a serious look and Flybe might have already done/might be doing this.

EXT carried over 12,000 passengers on its MAN route in June, albeit it seems to have fewer direct Flybe routes (than CWL) compared with those at MAN.

Whilst on the subject of EXT its LCY route appears to be continuing. In June it carried 2,840 passengers (CWL-LCY carried 2,543). I believe that EXT is a single daily service (to London in the morning, back in the evening?). If so and it's 7 x weekly the average load in June was 47.3. Some have made the point that CWL would have performed much better with a single daily service like that.

 

[Jerry]

Some have made the point that CWL would have performed much better with a single daily service like that.

Problem for Flybe is that they would need to possibly open up a new route from LCY that say would be sustainable as daily flight to CWL or far enough from LCY so that it takes up enough time so the CWL return leg is late enough for people to spend a day in London. Another way to do it as well would be overnight an aircraft at CWL and fly CWL-LCY-BHD in the morning then in the evening BHD-LCY-CWL but i can't see them doing it as it would be a lot of hassle for probably not a lot of reward.

EXT carried over 12,000 passengers on its MAN route in June,

MAN also acts as a long haul hub for EXT as flybe codeshare with both Thomas Cook and Virgin on their long haul flights out of MAN so as well as any point to point traffic CWL will have access to that as well if they had a MAN route.

 

[TheLocalYokel]

The last point is a particularly good one.

 

[andrewgreen]

Problem for Flybe is that they would need to possibly open up a new route from LCY that say would be sustainable as daily flight to CWL or far enough from LCY so that it takes up enough time so the CWL return leg is late enough for people to spend a day in London. Another way to do it as well would be overnight an aircraft at CWL and fly CWL-LCY-BHD in the morning then in the evening BHD-LCY-CWL but i can't see them doing it as it would be a lot of hassle for probably not a lot of reward.

MAN also acts as a long haul hub for EXT as flybe codeshare with both Thomas Cook and Virgin on their long haul flights out of MAN so as well as any point to point traffic CWL will have access to that as well if they had a MAN route.

Flybe also codeshare with Etihad out of Manchester as i have just found out as ive won a trip to Abu Dhabi out of Exeter connecting at Manchester with Etihad !

 

[TheLocalYokel]

Many congratulations Andrew.

 

[Jerry]

Flybe also codeshare with Etihad out of Manchester as i have just found out as ive won a trip to Abu Dhabi out of Exeter connecting at Manchester with Etihad !

Congratulations!

 

[Tinkerman]

BE has found a gem of a route in FCO at CWL. The figures over the last few weeks/months have been exemplary.

 

[Jerry]

FCO is doing well! CDG as well. Wonder if VY regret not giving it a try now? Flybe did well on Faro and that attracted Ryanair so I'm wondering if that might happen here?

 

[Tinkerman]

VY could easily fill a 3x weekly A320 on FCO at the moment alone.

BE are filling their E195's constantly now on the route, and VY are typically cheaper. Maybe one for VY to rue ...

 

[Foxlimayankee]

BE need profitable routes to sustain a profitable base to counter to lower performing routes. I'd rather they operated FCO and increased frequency. As nice as it would be to have VY on the route, unless it came from a based aircraft I see no reason why it should be handed to them. I don't think the route would survive with both on it.

 

[Jerry]

I honestly don't think VY will go on the route. They seem to be only interested in the Spanish routes they are operating now. The worry for Flybe will be Ryanair. I hope they leave it alone and Flybe can grow the route to 3 weekly next summer and then maybe up to 4 or 5 weekly in the future.

 

[TheLocalYokel]

Rome

Fascinating to wonder where the Rome passengers have come from.

The BRS easyJet daily route hasn't been impacted adversely with, for example, 10,666 passengers in May (up 6% on May 2016), load factor 95.5% on the 6 x 320/1 x 319 service each week, and 10,573 in June (up 10% on June 2016), lf 97.2%.

From this it might well be that most of the CWL-FCO passengers are new and many might not have flown at all without a local service.

Increasing Flybe rotations is probably something that the airline will be looking at but there will come a point when, although passenger numbers might continue to grow (with additional rotations), the yield might suffer. easyJet could no doubt increase its frequency from daily to 10/12 or even 14 weekly (four out of the next eight inbound sectors are already sold out) and still fill many of its seats, but the overall load factor might drop from the 90s% to the 80s% as a result which might be good for the airport in terms of footfall and ancillary spend but the yield for the airline would almost certainly be knocked back.

The same principle would apply to CWL-FCO.

 

[CraigW92]

I was curiously looking at the Flybe schedule for the the first part of next summer, I agree with the overall view that it's a solid schedule, routes that have performed well have been increased and those perhaps less so have either been reduced or an change in aircraft type, The gaps in the schedule are interesting, charter opportunities have been talked about:

Saturday's

Dubrovnik

06:40- 10:25 / 11:05-13:05

A big gap in the morning could suggest something along the lines of DBV, Balkan suggested a few years ago that they would like to have offered Croatia holidays, this however would have relied on an operator offering flights, this would do that, I think they offer holidays on the service from SEN, TUI could also take an allocation.

Intresringly I didn't realise there was a planned Air X charter to DBV this summer on behalf of another operator ( the cut of part seemed to indicate to SEP) clearly this never came to happen

View attachment 5742



I actually didn't realise there was a weekly charter planned to operate this summer from another company, clearly this didn't come to light.

There also seems to be another couple of interesting points, gaps in the Dash schedule which could be used for Southern France, Brittany is always a popular area ( Brest is only around an hour flight time) also TXL on the dash is very interesting, loads on the E195 haven't been too great ( 54% June, 67% July) so could explain this, although I'm sure things will end up changing again in the schedule as it did last summer, certainly one to keep an eye on

Elsewhere the majority of routes are seemingly having a good summer, In July, Rome is up towards the 90% LF, CDG, MXP. VRN mid to high 70s, ORK seems to have had its best ever month at 80% to name a few which is very encouraging, Of course there's also a few not doing so well such as MUC and GCI, If GCI does return next year perhaps a 2x weekly service ( Tues and Sat) would be more realistic and sustainable.

Overall I'd say things look to be good, well all know the E195 is too big for some routes but fine for some others, GLA is a fine example of this, a E175 would certainly make LF on certain routes look much better, however we don't know the yield on the base a whole, Shall be interesting to cast an eye on the whole schedule when its released.