Originally Posted by
davidjohnson6
After Thomas Cook went bust, Easyjet bought the slots at Gatwick and Bristol. Please correct me if I'm wrong but as far as I can tell, Easyjet are yet to announce new flights to use all these additional slots - which suggests part of the S20 schedule has not yet been made public. Have I missed something (Pete Olton - if you're reading this, your opinion would be much valued !) or is something to be released soon ?
Hi DJ6
My interest really only surrounded a potential base at BHX mainly founded on the 5 free slot pairs on BHX - AMS and 3 slot pairs on BHX - CDG and was fuelled further by the announcement of Edinburgh - BHX but it taking them 3 months to get it on sale which is virtually unknown for a domestic.
Then of course there was that spurious online article stating easyjet had bought some BHX Thomas Cook slots (believed to be a case of mistaken identity plus also rumours of slot issues at various airports once again delaying the "desired" schedule in being released, which of course isn't uncommon at the best of times let alone the following summer after a major airline went out of business.
It seems that a BHX base rumour was a non-starter with the likes of me putting 2 and 2 together and getting 3 based aircraft!
However there might be a development on the CDG but again I am not 100% that it has anything to do with easyjet but Air France have moved their first inbound A320 service to arrive at BHX 10.25 just 10 minutes after Flybe service and of course thus delaying all early morning long-haul CDG-BHX connections which makes absolutely no business sense whatsoever. This of course now leaves a slot on CDG-BHX arriving BHX between 08.00 and 08.30..
Again it could mean absolutely nothing as the slots the BE/VS/AF/KLM group were stated to give up are BHX based timings around 06.40, 12.05 and 17.10 outbound BHX. However another recent development I believe is that AF have also removed the second Flybe BHX-CDG service from sale on their website. The Flybe service had already been retimed earlier but now clashes with the outbound of with the new AF1165 timings.
The Flybe website and some GDS sites don't match all of this but of course it is Christmas and I would imagine the wheels move slowly in IT and route planning departments at this time of year.
It is probably too early to draw any meaningful conclusions but the impression is that Flybe are reducing their presence on BHX-CDG (possibly completely?) having already reduced BHX-AMS (Down to 4 daily in summer) and is another operator (easyjet, Vueling etc) about to take at least one or possibly more of three available slot pairs.
Sorry for the convulsed reply for something which in the end might have nothing to do with easyjet.
Pete