Originally Posted by
speedrestriction
Mesa's business model is to fly regional services on behalf of US mainline carriers. They may see some mileage in the model in Europe. Flybe has too many aircraft in the UK it would appear. Perhaps a fleet redistribution would be on the cards in the event of a successful bid.
It is harder to sell onboard to business people on 40 minute flight to another UK city than when you have people sitting down the back for 2+ hours. Additionally their baggage requirements are less. Priority boarding is not such an issue when a lot of the passengers are business pax with maybe only a laptop case - embarkation and disembarkation on the Dash eight never take particularly long. If BE is to make money it needs to be on the fare.
The thing is, its not only "business people" that use them. Theres a huge amount of VFR and leisure passengers. Aside from the on-board F&B product -in which there isn't much else to diversify in this market - the baggage issue can be. A Ryanair style cabin bag policy would make a lot of sense to Flybe. Their restricted cabin space takes a hit daily because huge amounts of passengers choose to take large carry on bags onboard. As you rightly say, business pax / day trip will generally only carry a small rucksack / laptop case. Anything larger and additional should be charged for. It makes things clearer with the allowed size policy, encourages more people to travel lighter, speeds up boarding, and gives further options to those that want to carry something larger. Perhaps even them considering instead to place luggage into the hold if it was slightly cheaper up to a certain weight limit. With the majority of passengers currently electing to take a larger bag onboard (non-sunshine routes in-particular), this would instantly create more revenue. Alongside all the usual basics such as seat selection, the various Flybe website incarnations have never been savvy enough to encourage the purchase of accomodation, car hire, transfers, lounge access or travel insurance etc either during the booking process, immediately after or before check-in. These are all ancillary revenue streams for their competitors.