Originally Posted by
BACsuperVC10
Liverpool Airport were bases for Easyjet and Ryanair prior to them arriving at Manchester so those airlines were not attracted away from Manchester indeed neither have expanded greatly at Liverpool since that happened. I very much doubt Liverpool Airports management ever expected Adria to begin their proposed operations considering their financial situation, of course we are not privy to negotiations but I cant really imagine why Liverpool Airport would go after an airline in such dire shape. Wizz and Blue have only ever operated from Liverpool and of course they will have to offer them attractive rates but there will be a limit to what an airport the size of Liverpool can offer compared to its much large neighbour same for LBA which as far as I know also hasn't attracted any business from Manchester airline wise, with Jet2 growing very slowly if at all there.
If Manchesters financial dominance allows them to offer much lower rates than Liverpool and indeed any other northern airport, I'm not sure how this can be considered a benefit to the region as a whole or passenger.
We are basically left with less choice and a growing monopoly at one airport not to mention job losses. I don't accept the lower fares argument , weather you fly from Liverpool or Manchester or Leeds they are all competing and would have to therefore offer attractive fares otherwise many passengers would just use Manchester if the fare from there was so much less.
If Liverpool looses its main carriers to Manchester due to anti-competitive pricing, I fear for Liverpool Airports future, which I believe to be highly detrimental for the travelling public and the loss of a northwest asset.
A number of points raised here. Firstly, I have made no assertions concerning which airline operated from which airport first. It seems irrelevant to the points I addressed in my earlier post. Indeed, LPL was absolutely dominant in the no-frills sector for many years, so they have shown that they are able to compete very effectively in this space without an artificial 'leg-up' from a regulating authority. LPL continued to do well in the no-frills sector right up until C-19 brought the entire market grinding to a halt. With reference to my earlier post, the point I made was that EZY and RYR did play their MAN and LPL bases off against each other over a number of years and presumably benefitted from doing so in the form of more competitive terms which they could pass along to their customers. Wizz - whilst never to date operating from MAN - has also used the mechanism of seeking alternative offers to keep terms competitive. I expect that Blue Air routinely does likewise. And fair enough; that is how the business works. Similarly, those airlines which have selected MAN as their primary operating base will also periodically sound out alternatives to keep their terms as competitive as possible. MAN has in the past lost CSA, Air India and Bangladesh Biman (first time around) to this process, and Adria had expressed intent to do likewise. Primera Air also selected BHX as their main base ahead of MAN, and Monarch Airlines reduced their MAN presence in favour of expanding at BHX instead. MAN doesn't automatically win every battle. And BTW, I doubt that LPL would have enjoyed privileged access to Adria's accounts at the time of that bid. They were business worth pursuing when they were pitched. This competitive bidding process is healthy for airlines and their customers, and from the perspective of airports it works both ways. LPL (and others) can (and do) gain at MAN's expense as well as the other way around.
You may recall that afew years ago Ryanair abruptly pulled all its schedules ex-MAN with the exception of the Dublin service in a dispute over "rip-off fees". So MAN certainly wasn't using any "anti-competitive pricing" powers to gain advantage over the thriving LPL base at that point. And Ryanair's return to MAN post-dispute came with higher charges attached ... I don't know what the LPL fees were but it does seem that Ryanair was paying more to use MAN. So again, the evidence suggests that MAN has not used its size to undercut LPL on price in the past. On the contrary, it has leveraged its attractive business proposition to charge more than smaller airports do.
The situation vis-a-vis LBA is different again. The reason that Jet2 stopped growing much there was that they had effectively bulked out the airport in terms of overnight aircraft parking capacity. Pre-COVID, LBA was operating pretty much to the capacity its fixed infrastructure could tolerate, so no adverse effects from neighbouring airports inhibiting the action there. We don't know how the market will respond post-C19, but beyond it's 2019 throughput, LBA growth is primarily dependent on increasing terminal and aircraft parking capacity on site. Certainly, MAN was not eating their lunch back then. Note too that LBA actually DID attract a Ryanair base AFTER that carrier was an established based operator at MAN.
Your assertion of MAN operating on a monopolistic basis doesn't stand up to scrutiny. Pre-COVID, LPL was scoring around five million pax per annum which is pretty healthy going. LBA, as mentioned, was restrained by the limitations of their infrastructure but operating broadly to capacity. DSA was doing fine, and has offset the recent loss of it's FlyBe operation with a two-ship Wizz base (alongside their existing TUI business). That would put them on course for record passenger throughput once C-19 is behind us. EMA is most notably a cargo hub, though it does have a healthy sideline in passenger airline business which appeared to be ticking along nicely pre-virus. Meanwhile, as mentioned earlier, BHX can point to its fair share of wins in the perennial battle for business with MAN.
So there is no evidence of any genuine issue with the existing system of airports competitively pitching for airline business. All local airports can boast their share of successes. MAN has never run away with 100% of the pie, and I don't anticipate anything close to that transpiring, notwithstanding that first-level airports tend to be the focus of consolidation in an immediate post-recession market environment. We may see an element of that playing out, but it does not constitute anti-competitive behaviour by the beneficiary airport. MAN is not state-backed ... it needs to make money, and all it's business pitches must allow for a worthwhile return to the bottom line, no matter how bids are structured. They've got an expensive new terminal extension to pay off.
The recent round of alarmism from some LPL advocates is without merit. The current system of airports competing for business from a range of carriers is working just fine. And the ultimate winners from this process are the fare-paying passengers.