Originally Posted by
highwideandugly
Good post Pug..
To say demand is there , is this now just naturally historical?
Aberdeen…yes for now , a dynamic market.
Amsterdam..again an unequalled choice for world wide connectivity.
Alicante..always popular.
Palma..the same.
But there lies the problem..other than those four..it’s going to be difficult to generate new routes and get them up and running for a few years without a cost risk to the airlines or a dilution of nearby established markets?
This is another problem with crude ticket tracing analysis. Whilst it’s a good way of establishing overall propensity to fly in any given region, the route breakdowns are problematic. I think it’s reasonable to believe that the single most common airport Teesside passengers use is Newcastle. So say Teesside region generates 30,000 air passengers per year between itself and Copenhagen and Newcastle accounts for say 70,000, it’s a much safer bet to run the route from Newcastle and the Teesside based passengers are still an important portion of the NCL-CPH market. Should the same airline decide to operate the route from Teesside as well as Newcastle, you would effectively double your costs and perhaps gain a few extra passengers from York (for instance), but probably not enough to justify increasing your costs. In all likelihood Newcastle would have a decent frequency which appeals to the passengers but that would be sacrificed to operate alongside Teesside. So in conclusion it makes far more sense from an operators perspective to concentrate on just serving Newcastle. Same principle applies if it is a competitor airline, market is diluted, frequency becomes threatened. This is then compounded by Leeds Bradford to the South, again same principle applies. So the only way that a new route would work like this is as was previously mentioned, a niche where the operator is guaranteed a sufficient number of people travelling in high value tickets to service industry. Appreciate this is a very round the houses explanation of what I mean.
Add to all this the number of leisure operators that have disappeared over the last 20 years.. Thomas Cook, Airtours/Mytravel, a plethora of IT specialists that had multiple weekly flights to Turkey. All the low cost airlines like BMIBaby, Globespan, FlyBe (mk1), going further back Go, Mytravel lite etc. plus all those familiar names like Air2000, Britannia, Astreus, XL, Monarch and the overseas ones that used to position from the Med like Futura, Air Europa, Spanair, Iberworld, Eurocypria, Cyprus Airways etc etc I’m sure there are loads that I’ve forgotten. How many of those still exist? How many large tour operators still exist? These days there isn’t much in the U.K. except for TUI, Jet2, Ryanair and Easyjet. They all operate from Newcastle and Leeds. Much like Teesside, Doncaster was built when a lot more of those operators were around.
KLM do a great job for the U.K. regions, long may that continue. There is undoubtably some untapped/unserved demand for more bucket and spade destinations. But apart from that, Teesside should continue to develop its GA businesses to give it a USP/undisputed core business.