Originally Posted by
Albert Hall
Can anyone explain what on earth is happening in this airline and whether they have proper control over their schedule?
I was looking at a trip from Bristol up to Glasgow in November. Schedules are - as you'd expect - heavily cut back but the flights left make no sense whatsoever. Returning from Glasgow to Bristol on Fridays, there are two flights in the day. That's fine, but the first one is at 1620 and the second is at 1640. WTF? The winter schedules between Birmingham to Glasgow are equally atrocious. A little bit of digging and you then find that the fourth of what look to be four Glasgow-based aircraft is flying to Malaga at 1630 on Fridays and looks to have sat around all day before it does so. The dire schedules on the domestic trunk routes are simply inexplicable.
This has all the hallmarks of the commercial equivalent of an impending CFIT. Reductions in schedules are absolutely right and commercially prudent, but leaving a schedule in place which then will be useless to the average punter is surely going to make a bad situation even worse. I'd be selling my shares if I had any!
Just trying to make sense as why they'd schedule flights close together. The airline is a very commercial enterprise and there usually is a logic that is not visible to us.
Let's suppose the following :
The level of business travellers is very low at the moment. This is true. The mainstay of travellers are leisure or VFR. Given pricing consideration, they can be more flexible on timings, or where limited other alternatives are available, they'll take what's on offer schedule wise. Now assuming volumes can be low and the situation is volatile especially as Covid cases are on the rise mostly everywhere, scheduling multiple flights close together allows them to switch passengers to earlier/later flights and cancel one. This can save on refund, EU261 etc. This is the only sense I can make of such a scenario.
Trying to offer business traveller schedules with same day returns on many routes currently is the space for regional jets/smaller units. Like Loganair or EIR are offering ex BHD on domestic routes..
From recent travel experience there certainly would appear to be business travellers, but the volume/proportion is much much lower...