My gut feel is that EZY will start up a SOU base within 2 years (bold I know and of course could be totally wrong). As described above, the passenger growth projections from 2019 - 2021 increase by 1.6m and this will only come from a LCC base in my opinion. This type of expansion mirrors that of EZY at London Southend when they announced a new base with 3 aircraft flying to 10 destinations initially and carrying over 500k passengers per annum. In an interview at the time the CEO of EZY described the new base as being very attractive to them with a train station on site meaning a great passenger experience for their customers of air side to land side in under 15 minutes and central London within 56 minutes (SOU being 66 minutes) and that this type of opportunity was aligned to their future vision of overall transport connectivity. The airport infrastructure at SOU is already in place, albeit air side and terminal will need expanding, and with good road and rail links to London and at a time when the South East has runway capacity issues that will not be alleviated for probably another 10 years with runway 3 at LHR. I don't see Ryanair setting up a base as they have just announced EXE and BOU is already on the doorstep. Jet2 I also see as more leisure out of BOU if a base was introduced and in any case I don't think they have the airframe capacity at present to expand further. Interesting times!