Originally Posted by
BA318
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I would guess that further long haul growth will come from India, China possibly Thai, and African carriers.
With Indigo having finally placed their long-rumoured widebody order for 30 A350-900s (plus a further 70 options) and following on from pre-Covid era media comments, London is likely to be among the first long-haul destinations the airline could (and IMHO very likely would) serve with a dedicated widebody fleet direct from Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore, given the extremely tight slot situation at Heathrow and that as an LCC (of sorts) with a track record of profitability and prudent management of its finances Indigo IMO is unlikely to shell out crazy sums for Heathrow slots it would struggle to recoup given the type of passenger it would most likely attract as well as Heathrow's high airport user charges (reportedly up to twice Gatwick's), this should make Gatwick Indigo's prime target (in preference to Stansted provided Gatwick has slots that are workable for the airline) re the London area airport from which to launch direct flights to Delhi / Mumbai / Bangalore. However, this won't be an imminent prospect as the first of the airline's just ordered A350s are not due to arrive until 2027.
Interestingly, Norse UK's head of route planning has in a recent media interview stated that the airline's just announced Gatwick - Cape Town winter seasonal route was something his team was looking at for a long time, along with other potential (presumably winter seasonal as well) routes to other African destinations from Gatwick in Kenya and Tanzania. If anything concrete comes of this, among the routes most suited to a fly Norse operation in these countries from Gatwick are Mombasa and Zanzibar IMO. (In this connection, I still vaguely recall African Safari Airways / ASA, which I believe was a Swiss-owned, Kenyan-based charter airline doing Gatwick-Mombasa direct during the winter in the 1990s and possibly the early noughties with its own dedicated A310s featuring a zebra-striped tail fin.) Further related to this, could we potentially see BA [re]launch flights from Gatwick to Entebbe and Dar Es Salaam and potentially to Arusha / Kilimanjaro and Zanzibar (the latter perhaps as a competitive / retaliatory response to Norse should Norse decide to launch Zanzibar), maybe, Entebbe and Dar Es Salaam year-round and Arusha and / or Zanzibar winter seasonally?
Reverting to the topic of additional winter seasonal routes Norse could serve from Gatwick, both Gatwick-Durban and Gatwick-Colombo spring to mind.
At the opposite end of the scale, i.e., who is leaving Gatwick rather than coming to Gatwick, Business Traveller has just reported that Lufthansa has removed Gatwick-Frankfurt from its GDS inventory as of 1 July 2024. This doesn't surprise me at all given how many strikes either this airline or their main base and primary global hub at Frankfurt has had ever since the route's relaunch, with (in my past experience) crappy staff attitudes to match, especially when seated at the back of the plane which among all the big airlines I travelled with (incl. BA, Emirates, KLM and Air France) puts Lufthansa truly in a class of its own (and I'm not saying this in a positive sense). Taking all of these factors together, who in their right mind would still want to fly Lufthansa? I'm sure that when this is confirmed and the airline will be asked to give a reason for pulling its Gatwick-Frankfurt route, it'll do what it has always done "best": blame the Gulf carriers for all its (self-inflicted) woes (like it recently blamed the Gulf carriers for having cut the number of Far Eastern destinations it supposedly still serves from 14 pre-pandemic to only four post-pandemic). Let's hope they'll give the daily morning pair of Gatwick slots to their subsidiary Swiss to allow it to go double daily on their recently launched Gatwick-Zurich route to make it a proper feeder for their Zurich hub. I personally consider Swiss a.much better airline than Lufthansa and would expect them to succeed where Lufthansa failed provided it can secure the slots at Gatwick to make the Zurich route an efficient feeder for its global connections radiating from Zurich. Anyway, there will be no shortage of takers for the slots Lufthansa will be vacating at Gatwick.