AA's Rebuff !
Well I only learnt of this last night just before going out to a clients Xmas bash which was predictably boring & gave me some time to ponder on this action.
In retrospect the initial announcement of AA's proposed service was a stunner & probably ranked as one of the most significant in the last 10 years of NCL's operations, even having regards to those that have appertained to Easyjet & all those Loco's that have followed.
It just shows that one must not get carried away, eg the rather "jingoistic" comments I noted recently on this link suggesting that NCL may one day take on BHX and an even larger establishment whose comparison is far too ridiculous to even mention again.
To me the whole sorry debacle, as this is what it is turning out to be, was just too good to be true, has given me a feeling something akin to when one notes an advert for an item which is impossibly cheap & when followed up it isn't cheap after all, but simply a misprint.
What were AA thinking about ?, all this nonsense about fuel costs in this instance is in isolation an irrelevance. Also personally I do not accept that load factors would not have been excellent, though how any moron can in the short time that has been available, suggest that poor advance sales was a factor is beyond me. No one can judge a route which through AA's own incompetence in its endeavours to licence in the US courts took considerably longer to put on sale, in addition business traffic which creates the higher revenues are by their nature not booked until very near departure & AA would more than anyone be aware of this.
No the whole issue is simply down to politics, once again the North East is the loser in the "North-South" divide. Recent developments in bilateral agreements are likely to yield US airlines & AA in particular greater access in the South East & LHR , so why even bother with overhead and the percieved gamble now in launching a "thin route" to a place that very few in the US are familiar with ?
Unfortunately considerable damage has now been done to NCL's reputation & I for one doubt whether any US airline will be remotely interested in touching us in the next 10 years. After all as a quote on the previous link to "...********.com" put it we are "only 91 miles from Edinburgh!", BUT as everyone fails to mention, we suffer from serious discrimination as regards road transport links in the North East and perhaps it is more relevant to mention that from the perspecitve of most NE residents it may as well be 191 miles for the use it is.
Finally there is of course one winner in all this BA, who must be sparing themselves the odd smile, their future business traffic stream to LHR T5 is looking less vulnerable & also any cnflict with their partner AA no longer exists.
NCL are going to have to pull all their resource to overcome this, "buying " passenger numbers with Loco's is all well & good, but these punters are fickle and in most cases price sensitive, a very risky market as a basis for a long term strategy.