Stansted - Dole is operated by Ryanair on Saturdays until 30-March, is suspended over the summer/autumn and then resumes again on Saturdays from 21-Dec-2019. This would seem to indicate it's operated as a ski flight
I took a flight on this route in January this year - apart from half term, yields look to be very low, the load factor on my flight was abysmal and, compared to Geneva or one of the more traditional ski-centric airports, it's very time consuming to get to the mountains. While I was at Dole airport, there was a flight departing to Kittila in northern Finland; Santa doesn't live in Kittila - the only reason to visit Kittila in winter is to go skiing in a place with reliable snow. Yes, there is a TGV service from Dole to Lausanne (runs every 4 hours and take 1h30) but this does not make for an easy link between the airport and ski slopes. The only place really worth visiting neaby in winter is Dijon - lovely place but much more appealing when it's warm rather than mid-winter. The Stansted-Dole route is rather reminiscent of the Stansted-Cuneo route that FR used to operate in the winter - eventually Ryanair discovered that people skiing in the Italian Alps prefer Turin airport
So why are Ryanair resuming this route in December 2019 ? I would have thought that by now, someone in Dublin would have realised the mistake, accepted that they had to run the route until the end of March 2019, and then quietly killed off the route permanently. Is the Jura regional goverment paying *that* much in marketing support or is the contract really so strict that Ryanair can't buy their way out of it ?
Last edited by davidjohnson6; 18th Feb 2019 at 00:03.