Originally Posted by
owenc
I know you are keen to dismiss Northern Ireland and our market.
We have approximately 20,000 people of Asian descent here so not tiny.
Our passenger market is around 9 million which is larger than NCL's 4 million.
I am sure we could handle a Middle Eastern route.
I would recommend that you read my previous post, which shows that the ‘BFS/BHD handle more passengers than NCL’ argument is simply pointless and misleading.
If Northern Ireland was connected to GB by road/train, then passenger numbers from BFS/BHD would plummet. Remember - 73% of BFS/BHD passengers in 2017 were domestic. A more fair analysis is by looking at international passengers, in which NCL handles more than double the number from BFS/BHD, or by looking at hub links - NCL thrashes BFS/BHD on this measure as well.
Also, BFS/BHD have a 120 min catchment area of 1.95 million. NCL’s 120 min catchment area is 3.7 million. It’s much more accurate to use these figures given by the airports instead of saying Belfast doesn’t deserve a ME3 route because it is smaller than Newcastle. Afterall, the cities don’t encompass the entire catchment area. One point worth noting is that while approximately half of BFS/BHDs catchment area is solely theirs, almost all of NCLs catchment area overlaps with those of EDI, GLA and MAN.
However, your point with regards to the Asian population of NI is interesting. Just because NI has a small Asian population, it doesn’t necessarily mean that a ME3 route isn’t sustainable. After all, there are only approx 60,000 Asians living in Ireland, and they make up roughly the same percentage of the Irish population as in Northern Ireland