1. A cruise ship terminal has nothing to do with whether or not an airport is successful. Cruise ship customers either are coming from London or going to London and simply using SOU as a stepping stone. London doesn’t have its own cruise port. Granted you may get a few fly in/cruise out pax but that would be a tiny fraction of what most people do and where most customers originate. If I took a cruise ship out from Southampton I would certainly not want to be flying back to SOU on a turboprop. I will fly into LHR in style up front with BA. Most of those 2m customers at the cruise terminal are British or American.
2. Take your passion Rivet Joint and try and do something with it. For instance would you sink your own money into an airline at SOU? Would you be willing to put your money where your mouth is and re-mortgage your house for it for example?
3. SEN. Jan 18 CAA stats show that their GLA, DUB and MAN routes only managed 30% load factors. I would say SOU is far more successful than SEN currently and I doubt very much that SEN would be able to sustain anything above 1m pax per year for long without massive advertising spend, shorter train times and closure of LCY