Originally Posted by
rog747
i don't think folk here are showing negativity towards Lolo - it's more like informed observation and from experience - (professional airline experience, not amrchair CEO's and plane spotters) my 40 years of holiday airline experience tells me that Lolo needs to do something to make their services work and be apparent from SOU and as fas I can see they have not - whether that be advertising local and or more distant, travel agencies, and getting other tour operators on board to share the load and risk of the flight series etc etc
Volotea did not make it with selling their own scheduled services from SOU nor SEN so they just fly in now for TUI Holidays (packages)
Air Malta has started from SEN to MLA via on some days Cagliari and Catania with selling rights
the IT market down this way EXT BOH and SOU is pretty much sewn up by TUI and in part Thomas Cook from EXT
Palmair is long gone sadly and they were the only ones who made it work, once - and they had a massive loyal repeat clientele plus their own high st agencies - but still they closed down.
Good post but if I can just point out one error!
Volotea has only ever served one destination within the UK on a scheduled basis and that was only SOU, the airlines flights to SEN have always been chartered flights operating on behalf of TUI as they do with their current SOU flights to Ibiza and Palma.
Volotea previously operated twice weekly scheduled flights from SOU to Palma and once weekly to Ibiza along with the current twice weekly flights to Palma operated on behalf of TUI as well as Ibiza once a week which was originally scheduled.
SOU has a huge catchment area and largely a wealthy one and the airport and airlines need to be more proactive in promoting flights from the airport, the amount of people that I chat to are unaware of what is on offer and even Vueling didn't last long on BCN to SOU a route that surely should have succeeded but it didn't purely because hardly no one other than aviation enthusiasts knew it existed and therefore loads were light but theoretically the route should have been a success and could have culminated in Vueling expanding at SOU in a similar way to how they have done at CWL.
There was talk on these forums a few weeks ago regarding EasyJet starting 4 x weekly flights from Palma in summer 2019, since nothing has materialised I should imagine that we can take that rumour with a large pinch of salt but it would be absolutely great for the airport if it eventually happened.