Originally Posted by
LesPretend
With Bristol isn’t it a catchment that’s got used to cheap fares and baulks at having to pay the ‘proper’ price?
It was very often £200 cheaper for me to drive to Inverness to catch the EZY than catch a BMI to BRS from ABZ
Two of the three main bmi regional/flybmi routes from BRS were to Frankfurt and Munich, with Lufthansa code share in the latter years on both. Both routes had seen rising passenger numbers each year since their inception: FRA's first full year in 2014 saw over 29,000 which had risen to over 53,000 in 2018. MUC rose from 18,000 in 2014 to 48,000 in 2015. We don't know how many of these were p2p or how many flew on with Lufthansa 'main line'. Neither do we know how well flybmi did out of the deal.
The loads on FRA and MUC were probably above the airline's average, although looking back over 20 years under various ownerships bmir/flybmi's annual load factor was never more than 62%. Most years it ranged between 54% and 59%. Ironically, the Bristol region is probably one of the few city regions in the country served by a small airport that could potentially sustain the high fares that bmir/flybmi usually charged on most of its routes, but it would seem that was not enough. That said, the region still loses a lot of travellers to LHR even on routes served from BRS but which might sometimes have poorer frequencies/timings.
The other main flybi route from BRS was Brussels, latterly as a code share with Brussels Airlines and before that on behalf of Brussels Airlines. As far back as last autumn the Brussels Airlines booking engine indicated a change from the end of March this year with AR8 equipment replacing the small EJets operated by flybmi. It was presumed that the aircraft would be those of CityJet. Brussels is currently not operating at all from BRS and the AR8 start date has been pushed back twice to September this year.
flybmi also operated to Paris CDG, Hamburg and Dusseldorf from Bristol with, usually, high fares and no more than average loads for the airline on the latter two. We don't know about CDG because easyJet also operates to there and in fact is doubling its frequency to 14 x weekly this summer. HAM has an Airbus and Imperial Tobacco connection between the two ends of the route but easyJet tried it a over decade ago and it didn't work for them. DUS has had Ryanair to Cologne as a near competitor in the past year or so. An earlier flybmi route to Milan MXP has been taken up by easyJet and Ryanair from this summer.
I've set this out in some detail because it shows part of what Loganair might have considered if they seriously mused over BRS, and they would be in a better position to judge than anyone having operated the routes through a sister company.
The only flybmi BRS route that Loganair has taken on is Aberdeen. HAM, DUS and CDG might not be seen as viable partly for the reasons I listed above, and the airline might be concerned that Brussels Airlines really will restart the BRU route.
That leaves FRA and MUC, probably the two routes that BRS will miss most. The Loganair ownership will know what flybmi got out of the code share and presumably it's not to their liking, even if they were in a position to operate these routes.