Originally Posted by
caaardiff
FR seem to be working well with CWL at the moment, especially after the recent APD press release, but no Airline will favour good relationships over business, especially FR. Provided FR are getting what they want, they will stay, if they don't, they'll pull the plug. You could argue that is whats happening at BRS at the moment. EZY and TUI/TCX are dominant in their markets at the moment. Why FR haven't expanded is anyones guess. BRS may not be willing to give FR the deals they want and are comfortable that their other carriers will pick up the routes, that where FR are being stagnant and looking to the other Airports in the region, (CWL, EXT, NQY, BOH) that you could argue are desperate and all have catchments that are leaking to BRS.
Ryanair has stagnated to a degree at BRS in recent summers: 2016 27 destinations; 2017 29 destinations; 2018 32 destinations; 2019 31 destinations (Reus yet to appear) but within this there have been frequency tweaks to accommodate the additional routes, giving a broadly flat pattern of overall seating capacity in recent summers.
Winter is entirely different with Ryanair expanding at BRS each winter over the past four winters (as is easyJet), from 15 destinations in winter 15/16 to 25 destinations in the current winter with seating capacity up over 60% during that period. Ryanair and easyJet have competed on the main sun routes for many years but increasingly Ryanair is replicating some of easyJet's non-sun routes such as Krakow, Venice MP and (new for this winter) Seville and Sofia.
It might not be then that Ryanair isn't getting the deal it wants with BRS but rather it recognises that CWL has been under provisioned for many years and now is the time to do something about it - in particular with the main sun routes. For example, in 2007 which was CWL's best ever year with nearly 2.1 million passengers Palma handled 170,000 passengers, Alicante 161,000 and Malaga 150,000. In 2017, despite Vueling and the charter carriers, the figures were respectively 112,000, 105,000 and 85,000.
CWL has invariably done well with its sun routes in the main summer period in terms of passenger numbers - as always I know that high loads anywhere don't necessarily bring successful yields - so perhaps it's something of a surprise that airlines haven't sought to exploit this particular market more quickly as the airport recovers from its nadir in 2012.
Originally Posted by
cymru
But have Vueling reduced capacity to Barcelona and Malaga compared to last summer or has it remained the same?
Vueling is not operating Barcelona from CWL in summer 2019.