Originally Posted by
EK77WNCL
I believe it is also the fault of the airlines, in part, for directing resources elsewhere. When it comes to NCL they all seem to jump on the same bucket and spade routes, which really does little good for anyone.
Ryanair appear to be having positive results by going against the grain and offering Warsaw, Gdansk, Wroclaw and Madrid. EasyJet appear to be doing well to Berlin, Jet2's charters do well, but (except Ryanair, of late) they're all very slow to commit long term. i.e I'm sure NCL-VIE could e a success with Jet2. Budapest, Munich, Milan, Venice, Hamburg, Lisbon, Athens with EZY/FR/EW/W6
Originally Posted by
EK77WNCL
I completely understand that, however, most of the routes that I mention have been served before, quite successfully.
You may argue that a;ll of these destinations can be reached via Amsterdam, Paris, London etc. But surely for our deprived area, we would be served much better with £50-100 flights from EZY/FR rather than £200+ with the legacies
Not to mention that we're still about 1,000,000 pax behind where NCL/MME both were in 2006/7, so demand does still exist!
NCL is doing rather well when you compare it to similar airports with similar catchment areas. An example would be to compare with Belfast's two airports BFS & BHD.
Hub Links;
NCL: Air France (CDG), bmi Regional (BRU), British Airways (LHR), Emirates (DXB), Eurowings (DUS), KLM (AMS)
BFS: none
BHD: British Airways (LHR), KLM (AMS), Icelandair (KEF)
That gives NCL passengers the choice of x1 OneWorld, x2 SkyTeam, x2 Star Alliance, x1 Unaligned. On the other hand, BFS doesn't have any hub connections, and BHD only have x1 OneWorld, x1 SkyTeam, x1 Unaligned
Long Haul Services;
NCL: Emirates (DXB), TUI (SFB)
BFS: Norwegian (PVD, SWF), Virgin Atlantic (MCO)
BHD: none
NCL have a Middle Eastern connection, whereas BFS have LCC operations to the US East Coast.
European Destinations by Airline;
easyJet: BFS (19), NCL (13)
Jet2: BFS (25), NCL (35)
Ryanair: BFS (13), NCL (12)
Thomas Cook: BFS (8), NCL (24)
TUI: BFS (12), NCL (31)
Wizz Air: BFS (1), NCL (0)
Despite adding 8 destinations for 2018, Jet2 still have a much smaller base at BFS than NCL, and both Thomas Cook & TUI have a huge number of destinations on offer from NCL compared to BFS.
Out of the 8 destinations you mentioned, only Milan is operated from BFS, EMA & LPL, all airports of similar size and catchment as NCL, and only Budapest, Hamburg and Venice are operated from two of the three airports.
Yes, you may think that all of these routes would work, and some of them may do so, but NCL is no further behind other similar airports in their European links, and in some cases is over performing in the number of European routes offered.