Originally Posted by
rog747
Today though here in the UK there is really only TUI and it's brands,
Have to disagree with you there, Rog, as Jet2 have really stepped up through the market. Although they offer schedules, and some non-package destinations, if you go with them to the Mediterranean the majority are on their own package holidays. They are also very prominent around the resorts, with badged coaches, reps, etc.
The issue with the Spanish carriers is for a tour operator they could only serve one country, whereas from a mainstream UK departure point the operators wanted to serve Spain, Portugal, Greece, etc, different ones on different days. If you want to allow for consolidation in lower demand shoulders, and flexing accommocation with departure points, it's easy for all departure points, and indeed multiple operators, to schedule say Fuerteventura on a Wednesday. But a Spanish operator finds it a nuisance to handle that on just one day a week, and I believe that was actually an issue for them, lots of positioning between airports for different days. Spantax even used to base their ops HQ in Palma each summer, and move it all over to Tenerife for the winter.
Aviaco lost their market through a particularly incompetent operation that came to the attention of the CAA. They had a Tenerife-Lanzarote-Glasgow DC9 round trip, and having only a half load on the Tenerife to Lanzarote sector, sold it as a day return trip to locals, which in itself might have been outside the terms of their licence. They miscalculated, because although there were about 50 empty seats on the outward short hop, which they had sold, the return load in the evening was almost wholly for Tenerife. Their fix was to deplane everyone at Lanzarote, put them through immigration, then leave about 40 of them behind, whereupon the handling agents went home and they were left wholly stranded, with no flights or ferry to Tenerife, and no accommodation provision or contact. They just happened to have a prominent (possibly CAA) aviation passenger on holiday in the group, who relayed the saga initially to Flight magazine, who printed it on their news pages, then to CAA HQ, and they were just told not to bother applying for licences next season.
I believe the Spanish carrier who did a lot of the early work for Intasun, in their earlier, Manchester-focused, pre-Air Europe days, was actually Transeuropa, with Caravelles, rather than Spantax. Much of Transeuropa's IT business was to Germany, who didn't like night flights, so Harry Goodman at Intasun picked them up for multiple post-midnight departures from Manchester.