Originally Posted by
fanrailuk
I wish he had done his homework before opening his mouth. The market at Cardiff will sustain a low cost airline in the Summer, it will not sustain it during the Winter. You might say that this describes the whole of the low cost market but at Cardiff it is more pronounced because whilst some of the catchment is wealthy enough to to take multiple flights a year, a large part of the catchment historically only went on holiday once a year and now can only afford to go on holiday once a year if at all.
You cannot take back passengers from Bristol by, let us say, using support from the Welsh Government because that would be illegal state aid. After December 31st, we don’t know what the competition policy will be of the UK Governemnt but we already know that they won’t allow APD to be devolved and therefore don’t support the Welsh Government taking passengers back from Bristol.
Ther is a risk in having a dominant low cost based airline at an airport the size of Cardiff. They would demand and get lower aeronautical charges, other remaining airlines (such as they are) would demand the same to enable them to compete with the low cost carrier. The low cost carrier could then use commercial power to keep those charges low, taking away aeronautical income that would deny funds for further development of the airport.
Up until coronavirus, the policy of attracting low cost airlines to fly from their foreign bases seems very sensible until Cardiff could achieve a large enough density of passengers to allow multiple airlines to compete. The problem at Cardiff was the deal with Flybe which didn’t give the passenger numbers and growth that would have been provided by a low cost airline but dominated the airport and therefore discouraged competition.
I was never encouraged that the airport would get through the loss making part of the deal into the nirvana of the profitable end of the deal because nobody could tell me what the Flybe strategy would be in 3 years never mind ten years.