Originally Posted by
SWBKCB
Why haven't easy and RYR already cherry picked the profitable routes? What's stopping them?
Easyjet have already put Birmingham-Glasgow and Birmingham-Edinburgh on sale. Birmingham to Amsterdam, Dusseldorf and Paris are probably being considered carefully
There is a large body of competition law which make various dubious practices illegal - eg price dumping, and imposes hefty penalties. The likes of Easyjet will be aware of this and want to make very sure they don't cause competition regulators to want to start asking questions. Any kind of public probe by competition aithorities can eat up huge amounts of management time, distracting them from strategic growth, cost millions, and create a damaging public image. It is therefore very important that if Easyjet do launch on Flybe routes, that they be able to prove very easily that they were not flying unprofitably so as to push Flybe out of business, and that there should be no uncertainty in a competition regulator's mind that they might have been doing this
It's also likely that Easyjet know they cannot compete with Flybe on frequency on business-centric routes, so will only want to launch when it really looks like Flybe won't be around for much longer.