Originally Posted by
SWBKCB
Absolutely - the easy option.
But look at TOM - expanding elsewhere but not at CWL, RYR - expanding elsewhere but not at CWL. What does that tell you? Maybe there is somenthing more fundamentally wrong than the social media strategy etc. Local economy, small/restricted catchement area, etc
TOM is up to 3 based summer aircraft, some W patterns and using other carriers. They have filled the gap left by TCX, so i'd say that is expansion.
Ryanair are now operating DUB, AGP, ALC and TFS, with the latter two starting this summer. Not exactly huge expansion, but still expansion. FR swap capacity around all the time. If these routes make money then hopefully there will be more from them to replace the lost Wizz capacity.
Carrrdiff - Well you just gave one example of what management can do - what did the management at BOH and EXT do ? What did LPL do ? Same airlines, same competitive industry with nearby airports. That’s my point again other smaller regional airports are being successful and they don’t have such benign owners (their owners are looking for returns).
They negotiated. I'm not sure what your point regarding EXT is alluding too, as TOM have a much bigger operation at CWL than EXT.
CWL have been trying to get Jet2 in for years. There is a slight overlap in catchment of BOH and BRS, where BRS pretty much caters for the whole South Wales market. If you were an Airline manager, which would you pick?
The same goes for LPL, much bigger catchment.
I can tell you exactly what the likes of Rigby and LPL do, they talk to airlines. To be more specific they don't just talk to airlines, they present well-researched business cases with facts that can be backed up. They tell you what businesses are travelling and where to and how often and sometimes even what they are currently paying to go via points a/b/c. Then they offer you a good proposition to help with the start-up phase of operations. It's a fairly well-worn, successful formula but it needs a substantial amount of focussed legwork by the airport.
Surely this is exactly what CWL did to get Vueling, Qatar, Flybe and Wizz in? They effectively paid Flybe to fly from CWL to eradicate the hefty cost of the E95's. Vueling had a huge 10 year marketing budget. What happened when that 10 years was up? Start to see VY cut flights.
CWL is under a lot of scrutiny of it's spending as it's Welsh Government owned, so I doubt as much money is there as would be from private owners.
The purpose of marketing an airport is to attract its customers. The customers of an airport are the airlines that may be attracted to use it not the passengers. It is for the airlines to attract the passengers. Airlines will put their business where they feel they can make the most profit or attract the biggest opportunity to do so.
Tosh. It's in the Airports own interest to get passengers through the door. How often do you see adverts from Ryanair? They almost market themselves just in name because of their popularity. The marketing that's needed is for people to know they fly from Cardiff, which many probably don't.
There's a Facebook Cardiff Flights and Deals page that has over 50k followers, 20k more than CWL's own page and regularly posts flights and deals which get many likes, and tags, and tags of tags. That's how word spreads, and it's pretty much free.
The issue isn't that the demand isn't there. The issue is that many of that demand choose BRS as their primary choice, even when those destinations are available from CWL.
Pre-pandemic that was changing and things were on the up. 1.6m annual passengers if i remember correctly.
You can throw as much money at Airlines as you like, but when you're left with a much smaller pool of Airlines to choose from, many of which already have commitments at BRS, it isn't going to be easy. BRS is a much bigger catchment, and if Airlines know Welsh people will travel to BRS, why dilute that? It will be a huge struggle to convince Airlines otherwise. To convince FR of that, it's going to mean bums on seats of the flights they do currently offer.
There's probably a lot of background work going on. But CWL has been very quiet of late, there needs to be a lot more open discussion, marketing and engagement with passengers going on to get things back to pre-pandemic levels and hopefully top 2m again. FR is probably the last option to help with that.