So I wanted to leave a few days for the bottom feeders to have their day in the sun.
Firstly, you have to congratulate the operator of BOH as their performance of late has been surprising to say the least. However, there are two big cautions I might add.
Firstly, their terminal, transport links etc simply won’t cope with the additional jet2 base so standby for lots of disgruntled customers and articles in the papers. I am not familiar with how jet2 operates but the size of the operation relative to the facilities as they stand today seems like a big clanger to me. This is going to cause a lot of work for their ops team. I see mention of the terminal being increased etc but as we all know planning takes around 2 years and then a further 2 years for construction etc.
secondly, BOHs performance lately does not follow the normal business development path. Out of nowhere we have seen the two existing operators grow quite a big and a new one come in with a sizeable operation all in a short period at an airport that has historically just been a small bucket and spade airport for the large retired population. Put simply, it seems suspect which usually points to distortion of the system. As I have mentioned a number of times now this illogical growth points towards huge incentives being offered in an attempt to bury your competitor if they are becoming a threat. We all know the fable of the foolish man that built his house on sand.
Turning to whether this is good or bad news for SOU, it’s hard on the face of it to see it as anything other than bad news. But let’s look at the facts.
Firstly, could Jet2 have chose SOU instead. Was this a SOU v BOH battle that SOU lost? No. When it was announced that (rather oddly) they had not chosen to take any A320s to the late 2020s it was clear Jet2 was not going to be an option for SOU until at least the end of the decade. 737s will unlikely ever be a thing at SOU which isn’t a problem at all. But at the moment Jet2 couldn’t operate at SOU and wanted a base on the south coast so had no choice but to pick BOH.
Now that we have established SOU was never an option at this moment in time. How is this going to affect SOU? A key thing that everyone seems to be overlooking is that 14 out of the 16 routes announced by Jet2 are already served by FR/Tui. So this isn’t really an increase of destinations served but increased frequency of existing routes. Only 3 of the routes announced are also operated at SOU and Easy is such a strong brand and SOU so much easier to get to that it shouldn’t really have much affect on SOU for those routes. Lastly, something that people also seem to overlook is the fact that SOU is unlikely to ever be a package holiday focused airport like BOH, EMA etc. I don’t recall it ever historically being one and I think the modern generation are more focused on seeing culture on city breaks and using AirBnBs than frying like a pig all week at the hotel pool and being chained to their food/drink offering. This is why I think Easy are hand in glove with SOU as they could provide flights to places of culture for the well off local clientele. All airlines will need to grow outside of London again and Easy is not going to move in at BOH like some crazy people are suggesting on the BOH thread. So SOU it is.
In conclusion congrats to BOH, but I think an implosion is in its future. As for SOU, fingers crossed Easy keep building their presence as it will be a big success if they do.