Originally Posted by
Skipness One Foxtrot
The triumph of hope over expectation. Who used to get an aeroplane from MAN-SOU? Business travellers. Who works from home via Zoom now? Those same guys.
The post-pandemic balance is still being established. At present (purely from my observations) the trend is slowly drifting more towards onsite presence - particularly for people who work in account management, B2B sales, and consultancy. Another new group of long distance travellers are the ones who previously lived in cities, but moved away when WFH became more commonplace. A number of people I have worked with moved to Scotland, but fly to London (and other places) to fulfil their obligations of being onsite a few days a month. I agree that the demand still isn't at pre-pandemic levels (certainly not enough to warrant 6 MAN-SOU flights a day) but there is certainly a growing demand.
Until it was axed mid last year, I used the MAN-SOU flights twice a month to go to my company office on the south coast. Despite the highish prices, and despite Eastern's shoddy reliability (I had my longest EVER flight delay on a MAN-SOU flight last spring) it was still way more convenient than the train or driving. And despite the fact it was only running once a day, the flights were getting busier with each passing week. Eastern's exit from the route was an odd one - it was right before the frequencies were due to go twice-daily, and coincidentally it was right before their Air France routes to Paris Orly began. I did my final return flight to Manchester right before the route ended and it was pretty much full.
As mentioned above, FlyBe2 had begun to sell tickets for the route, but the airline collapsed.