Originally Posted by
cavokblues
It does make you wonder about the long term viability of regional flying in this country.... you would have thought Manchester - SOU would be able to sustain an airline where there is the potential for a huge time and cost saving over the train.
Eastern made an overall profit last year of 237k, on a turnover of 16m - a margin of 1.45%.
Surely there is a bigger margin to be made on a well run operation between Manchester - SOU? Flybe used to fly over 500k folk between the two cities pre Covid!
Great that they made a profit, however, I wonder did they even fill half the seats? Their pricing is always off the charts. Even on DUB SOU, their pricing was up to 4 times greater than that of Emerald. Pricing that is commonly available on such routes by Emerald. Even eclipsing BACF who operate summer seasonally, argueably it's a sort of positioning flight for them but Eastern were up in the bushes. I've often checked easten for flying inside the UK and I personally would describe it as insult pricing ... Come back names like Manx Airlines (the original of the Manx brands), Suckling, or even Eurodirect who just were great at joining all the dots, though sadly that didn't list long, but they had ambition. With ATPs too.