Southampton-2

[Reversethrustset]

Rivet I have to agree with the others, I think you are deluded if you think easyjet will open a base, it's one thing to to positive and champion your local airport but you're starting to sound a little bit obsessed. I fly for them and I can say there's zero chance of it happening. I'm more than happy to hold my hand up if proven wrong but I'll even go as far as to say I'll eat my phone if it happens within 10 years.
Whilst the South is affluent I think you are over edging the possible demand. For easyjet to even entertain a base they'd have to have 6+ aircraft in situ to even consider it, I don't think you can fill 6+ A319/320s all day, every day to make it viable. Flybe were there for years and even the sunshine routes weren't rammed. I monitored the loads, if you can't completely fill an E195 to Malaga every 3 days you're not going to fill a 320 to Malaga once or even twice a day. All the other routes that the Q400 flew have zero chance of supporting an A320; why? Because if it did airlines would already be in SOU in abundance and the airlines would be pushing for a runway extension but they're not. BHX is a casing point, the extension to R33 was Emirates driven, the extension to SOU's runways is SOU airport driven.
You keep saying pax will come, but will they? Even if they do where are they coming from? Let's have a look, so basically the country has to travel, this could be for work, pleasure, business or whatever. Every year the number of people traveling either by bike, road, rail, boat or air is a fixed number once that year is up, so to make the maths easy let's say there were 1 billion journeys made last year.
Each airline, bus, rail, boat company, car etc will have their percentage of that pie, basically people will need a reason to travel, it could be a holiday, a business meeting, visit family, etc etc, what I'm getting at is you can't force people to travel so to grow your business you generally need to steal a piece of someone else's pie, so how is easyjet going to do that at SOU? Can they steal road or rail pax? Possibly, but very limited, can they steal boat pax? Probably not, can they steal other airline's pax? Of course they can, but where from? The only real viable place is LGW. Who's the biggest operator at LGW? Easyjet are, there is absolutely no viable reason why they'd want to steal passengers from themselves at LGW by significantly increasing their cost base by opening a multi aircraft base at SOU. You need to get over this notion that SOU is a massive golden nugget because believe it or not, airlines commercial departments will have done vastly more in-depth studies into the commercial viability of SOU than you can ever dream of, they would've done it already and they will continue to do it most likely for every "under served" regional airport as part of a growth strategy.. The sooner you wake up to the fact that you don't know best I think the calmer your life will be regarding SOU. It could tick along very nicely but it'll never be a major player.
Don't even get me started about your 737 analogy.