If indeed it has all gone south I’ve got a theory as to what happened...
In one of the documents accompanying the airport masterplan there was a graph of projected pax numbers which showed a pretty substantially jump between 2018 and 2019.
I suspect that in the early days of the masterplan project they had hoped to get the runway extension completed in winter 18/19 ready for expansion from summer 19 onwards.
For whatever reason the plans have been delayed and my money is now on the extension happening this winter coming, 19/20.
If that’s the case I wonder if Lolo were caught out by this?
They perhaps started a limited Skiathos operation to get their name out there and test the water, with plans to return the following year when the extended runway and other development work would allow them to reach new and unserved destinations with any medium-sized twin that they could find, as they would now be able to operate economically from SOU.
However when the runway extension got delayed they now had to scramble around trying to find an aircraft that was available in peak summer, able to lift a decent load off SOU’s still-unsuitable runway, and able to reach destinations around the eastern Med with those decent loads. Hence the confusion and conflicting reports we’ve heard about the aircraft- there isn’t one out there that can satisfactorily do the job out of SOU as it stands. As people have alluded to before, if these routes were feasible out of SOU at the moment they’d have been tried already.
They’ve also seemed a lot less professional than may be desired, and no doubt have been responsible for a lot of the current mess, but I can’t help but wonder if this was a decent idea but unlucky, unfortunately timed, and not well-executed.