Originally Posted by
EI-BUD
In the 1970s Southend Airport was huge on holiday package flights to the Mediterranean sun belt. This slowly faded away with Gatwick and especially Stansted becoming bigger and better etc. However, there is a really strong catchment locally, something in the order of 600,000-700,000 people. easyJet seemed to do well until Ryanair came in. It has to be sustainable for all parties and type fact easyJet came back at all is testament to their belief in the airport.. I think things will work out though things will clearly be bumpy financially until a sustainably level of traffic can be attached.
SEN's package holiday flights was not
huge huge -
but it was very popular -
In the 1960's onwards Channel Airways' own in-house holiday companies
Mediterranean Holidays, and then
Trident Holidays first flew holidaymakers to OST RTM BSL PGP RMI PMI AGP and GRO for the Costa's with Viscounts, then from 1967 added a BAC 1-11 and a year later added the Tridents, but the new Jets were soon delegated to fly from only Stansted, along with Comets they acquired in 1970 to fly big contracts for
Lyons Tours and
Wallace Arnold.
Channel were sadly not to see, nor would operate the 1972 summer season, which left a void at SEN for a while.
Thomson Skytours added SEN using BY's 737's in the 1970's to Majorca etc, and also local firm
Tom Hill Holidays chartered
Transeuropa Caravelles for PMI and AGP flying from both SEN and ZSD (as STN was known as back then).
Another local firm
Burstin Travel (who eventually went on to form its own, but unsuccessful in-house airline, Princess Air) had a fairly big IT programme for Majorca Malta and Faro etc, which saw Orion, Air Malta, Air Atlantis/TAP, Hispania and other airlines operate into SEN to fly the IT charters for them.
Volotea for Thomsons was about the last one with 717 and A319's to/from Palma.
SEN boomed again when Easyjet came along and EZY ended up with a 7 aircraft based fleet there, but Ryanair entered the patch and as usual
war began which ended up, along with Covid seeing SEN with zero flights almost overnight.