Originally Posted by
Atlantic Explorer
I think your hypothesis is slightly misguided. By your reasoning, any route will work which is ludicrous. You could have cheap, regular flights on a big aircraft from Inverness to the Faroe Islands for example, but it would never make commercial sense and would cost hundreds of thousands to operate the route and is therefore clearly not commercially viable.
There needs to be an existing customer demand for a route pairing in the first place otherwise you can make it as cheap as you like but it will never be viable as it just won’t generate the bums on seats required. The problem here being that demand is diluted by LBA and NCL with LCC already in place there offering cheap flight. The route needs to generate a profit otherwise it just won’t last, unless of course you chuck blank cheques from the Mayor at it.
Exactly, this is the problem when stating ‘there is demand’. Of course there is demand, but is it sufficiently strong enough to support a service day in day out? Teesside core market is smaller than Leeds and Newcastle so the battle will always be competing with airports with access to more people. For instance, I’m sure there are people travelling between Teesside and Dubai every day, does that mean there is demand for a service to Dubai from Teesside? An extreme example perhaps, but ticket tracing models don’t account for things such as choice and flexibility in isolation. Also in the U.K. it doesn’t account for what people like to define as a catchment area. Manchesters catchment area isn’t just Manchester, because it’s offering is so large the North and Midlands is it’s catchment area. Similar goes for the North East, Teesside is in the Newcastle and Leeds catchment area, but it doesn’t quite work the other way around. How do you convince an airline to invest millions into operating from an airport that has less appeal to larger numbers of people?
Not knocking Teesside at all, I hope it does find its feet again.