Loco my R's - even the fares are not cheap!
I needed to get my daughter from DUB to EXT last week at short notice due to a family illness. By short notice, I mean we heard about the problem at 1800, and needed to get her there by 1200 the following day.
Looked at Ryanair and Aer Lingus to Bristol, Ryanair to Bournemouth, and several other option, like Plymouth with Air Wales, and there were several other options further out from EXT.
OK, eventual destination was Exeter, but the nice surprise was that FlyBE was the cheapest we could get unless we wanted her to have to do some serious driving, which made it even better.
By cheaper, I mean that it would have cost about an additional €100 to use Ryanair to BRS, and then we'd have been into a round trip of 180 miles to get to EXT.
FlyBE are competitive. That's good enough for me!
They were competitive for other dates that we've used them for as well, relatively recently, so at the end of the day, they got the business, for the very simple reason that they were competitive.
No, they don't offer 99c flights, but the overall package works. Thats all that I as a reasonably aware SLF can ask for.
And before someone jumps down my neck and says that it was cheap to get the seats filled, both flights my daughter was on were good load factors, they were certainly not struggling numbers wise, so it wasn't a case of desperation for backsides on seats. Even in the depths of February, mid week, when we travelled over, the load factors were reasonable, and that's with the EXT flight now only serving EXT and not going on to Jersey and Guernsey like it used to, and there's now 3 rotations a day to SOU, so something must be right, that's more SOU than any other operator managed to do.
OK, I also know from following threads here over the years that FlyBE has had more than it's share of problems. Be thankful that youy don't have some of the issues that the FR people are on about here, I've seen some of them close hand having worked in DUB. I've also friends who were with FlyBE flying, and they seemed happy enough with the way things were, or, to be more specific, they were in no hurry to move to other things, and at the time, other things were most definitely available. QED