Originally Posted by
davidjohnson6
Over the last few months, SunExpress have flown a 1x weekly route from Luton to Gaziantep in southern Turkey. They also flew the route in summer 2019. The flight departed Luton about 10pm, arriving in Gaziantep around 5am, thus keeping an airframe busy earning revenue when it would otherwise be on the ground incurring parking fees. Fares on the website seemed healthy. Is anyone able to comment on how the route did commercially over the last few months ?
SunExpress tried non-stop London-Ankara in 2019... since then Anadolujet (ie Turkish) and Pegasus have both joined SunExpress on the route - so there is clearly money in the VFR London-Turkey market
Yes, I know Gaziantep functions partly as an entrypoint to Syria, but Gaziantep still has over 2 million residents
I'm wondering if SunExpress, Anadolujet, Pegasus or Corendon would consider a 1x weekly overnight route from London to places like Adana (or the new Çukurova airport) or Trabzon ? Neither of these are likely to see many tourists... but they are among Turkey's busier airports.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...orts_in_Turkey
Looking at the Germany-Turkey market, there are a lot of overnight flights which ethnic Turks will put up with to fly non-stop and save some euros - I am wondering how much this model might work in the UK
Luton-Gazientep carried 924 passengers in July 2022, so based on 4 flights every Wednesday in July, that's an average of 115.5 per flight. Using the 737-800 with 189 seats, that's 1,512 seats on offer, which means the average load factor was 61% on this route for the month.