Boilermaker,
it’s always a lost business initially to start a new route. They will have to fly at least 1 year to see the tendency. Low fares are for sure a good stimulus and necessary to enter the market, but QR has got different concept from European LCC. LCC in Europe are explicitly offering so-called point to point connection, in other words soaking pax. away from mayor careers (high fares) and the pax, who would otherwise use alternate transport tools like train, car and so on. QR, EK, EY, they are trying to be low cost long haul careers and that is, I suppose, is a bit more complicated. ME companies have to compete with other mayor careers on the long haul routes offering direct connections to south east and far east (upcoming tourist destinations due to political instability), having the same advantage (low labour costs like Thai or Malaysian or Philippines) and the differences in fares will not differ very much after getting established on the market. Besides that most of the airlines optimize their revenue and costs by joining alliances, star alliance, one world etc. Another pillar of money generator like Indian market is getting more independently and offering in couple of years for sure competitive long haul service e.g. UK and India, like jet airways. A very big market with a lot of ethnic traffic, who are very price sensitive.
A300Man-2005,
I have done some research and here are the figures as an example for the months Jan. until July, total traffic movements acc. to the ranking FRA-278.582, MUC-222.888, DUS-108.762, TXL-79.155 where as the pax amount dep/arr. FRA-29.536.547, MUC 16.053.359, DUS-8.646.744, TXL-6.547.923. The figure indicating dep/arr. outside the Europe, which is obviously interesting for us, as follow FRA-11.634.438, MUC-2.302.949, DUS-818.120, TXL-117.978. As you can see, the figures show that DUS is number 3. It’s nice to try to do something on our own; hopefully we will be successful with that. The annual research for the market costs about 20000 EUR, why not to do the same like EK, saving the research costs and do it better. We do it on other routes anyway, don’t we? Wide body A 300 for TXL 4 times a week will be a loss business, as far as me concerns, A 319 is more appropriate. However, coming back to the concept of long haul LCC, I understand QR wants to get rid of narrow bodies and operate only wide bodies, like EK. That’s why, I think TXL, unlike DUS, hasn’t got a potential for a daily wide body service.
I haven’t seen the figures for VIE, but I would expect VIE to have good potential.
Cheers.