Originally Posted by
Airlinepilot1687
It is so good to see more aircraft popping in to Carlisle and I really do hope some more routes will be developed in the near future. I was wondering if this extra aircraft is running the additional flights for the Rugby?
I too hope the airport flourishes with more and more routes. I live less than 15 minutes from it and Mrs M and I would dearly love to support it.
Unfortunately, Carlisle Airport is in association with the hopeless hapless Loganair, whose online booking facility is about the most amateurish in the Western aviation industry. I've just spent a fruitless 45 minutes trying to make a CAX-SEN return booking for Mrs M and myself, exactly as I did last October. The website is a muddled mess in which links aren't where they're supposed to be and no thought is given to user friendliness: it is, in fact, amongst the most unintuitive IT shambles I've encountered anywhere.
I complained to Loganair about this in October last year, and it has done precisely nothing about it since, so it clearly couldn't care less. The fact that the online booking system continues on unchanged also says pretty much everything there is to say about the management of Carlisle Airport, seeing as how the top priority at local level should be to attract custom. not allow an associate enterprise like Loganair to alienate it.
Finally, it seems evident from the declining PAX numbers that there ain't enough business travelers to sustain the airport indefinitely. Nor will capacity be boosted by a sudden rush of non-business PAX: on the one and only occasion, last year, when after complaining last year I finally managed to get a quote out of Loganair for Mrs M and myself, return, CAX-SEN total fare £164 PLUS total tax: £143.40 Total = £307.40, the vexed Air Passenger Duty issue raised its ugly head.
The topic isn't fully understood by the public at large (or so it seems to me, judging from conversations I've had with bemused friends and neighbours, all of whom are quick to assert that there's no tax to pay on top of the cost of railway tickets) and so long as it's misconstrued to be a nice little earner for HM Treasury, consumer antipathy is going to continue on. How much leeway Carlisle Airport itself has in regard to the APD level applicable, I don't know, but candidly, what with the "tax" ogre and the idiocy of Loganair's dysfunctional online booking facility, one would have to be an ultra optimist to see a longterm future for the airport.
As for my wife and I, we didn't fly from there to the south of England last October and we won't be flying out, either, in a fortnight's time: I've given up on attempting to complete my booking today as by the time such has been managed in regard to getting us to London Southend, I could probably have traveled by train from Carlisle to London Euston.