Originally Posted by
commit aviation
I am not sure what the benefit of this would be. Why move routes from LCY where there is limited competition so presumably reasonable returns, to LGW where you would be up against EZY and others? As mentioned elsewhere, I don't believe the maths of flying an E190 stack up against an A320 or B738.
Willywombat and yourself are assuming CF would compete with EZY. There will be some routes I am sure that are either not served by EZY or will have marginal return on the Airbus. It will be up to the analysts to identify those but serving niche routes could return decent yield.
LCY isn’t that useful without business connectivity which will decline for a period. For the few that can access central London easily, LCY works but it is easy enough to train it to LGW or LHR as an alternative. CF could keep the key business routes to and from Amsterdam, Scotland and Ireland etc and readjust their non core business and leisure. Florence as an example is served by Vueling from LGW but not at the same frequency; that could transfer to CF along with introducing some niche routes like San Sebastián. This is just two routes but I am sure others could be identified. Besides EasyJet and Ryanair offer low fares and obtain profit on their ancillaries. Buy on Board has all but stopped and with customers being advised to check in as much as they can to reduce movement in the cabin the adding on of baggage suddenly sees those low fares increase.
It’s just a thought but without any access to the numbers of then and now/predicted it’s hard to gauge demand on routes and what cost increases there are to handling flights, which will potentially be passed back to the consumer anyway.