Originally Posted by
Rivet Joint
This great post also deserves a bump. SOUs operating hour restrictions stopping a low cost carrier base is fake news.
Well that’s what I was thinking in an earlier post I made. Granted, some of the longer-distance destinations will never be viable from SOU, but if one looks at Jet2’s timings for their proposed new routes, we can see that there will be 27 weekly flights, so that’s two out and back rotations per aircraft on six days a week, and one double rotation and one single on the remaining day.
All of the flights are early morning and early/mid afternoon departures. If EZY were to base two aircraft at Southampton, and utilise them on routes to destinations such as Palma, Alicante, Faro, Malaga, Ibiza, Corsica, Paris CDG, Barcelona, Rome, Corfu, Copenhagen, Budapest, Edinburgh, Manchester, Jersey, Nice, Isle of Man etc, just as an example, all of these could be operated within SOU’s opening hours. If Belfast, Glasgow and Geneva could continue as presently utilising aircraft from those bases, I’m sure it would be successful.
It would need a serious, and I mean serious, marketing and promotional push, no make that a blitz, by the airport well before the services begin to build awareness, but it could be done.