no,no,no:
Thanks for the input which is quite interesting, if a bit confusing.
I haven't come across the idea of putting route A on sale in order to persuade airport B to cough up more marketing funds, as you say happened in the case of LTN-BRU - isn't that just using your unsuspecting passengers (who book in the naive assumption that the airline
is committed to starting the route rather than just staging an airport "beauty contest") as bait? Seems to me that if I'm airport B and I see the airline has already launched route A with the aircraft they
were planning to use to fly to my airport, I'll figure the game's up rather than being motivated to give them a still better deal.
No, I'm still confused. And your friend seems to be suggesting that they were playing this game with Luton in to get a better commercial deal from Munich, but then you're saying that it wasn't the commercial offer at all, but the slots, which scuppered the Munich service.
But if this washes over those of you who don't like to know the real reasons behind things, don't like to see people make a success out of things and don't like an intelligent debate then maybe I should have replied with an un-educated insult of my own like certain others instead!!!
Not sure who that was aimed at
but bmi regional
does whether you like it or not have a somewhat chequered recent record of route launches, even before LTN-BRU and EDI-MUC. Remember NOC-GLA? LCY-LBA? The back-and-forth with Baby over EMA-CDG? That's not exactly "making a success of things" to use your words.
You're quite right on one point - if they have the best record for punctuality and reliability, as long as it's in comparison with other operators with similar utilisations, then that's evidence they're doing some things right on the ops/engineering side.
(In the last full year of CAA punctuality stats - 2004 - and taking scheduled operations to all UK airports, bmi regional does indeed have about 89% of flights arriving within 15 min, just behind Eastern, on a par with VLM, and well ahead of BACX on 82%). So take a bow, bmi regional Engineering and Ops.
But I continue to find many of their route decisions perplexing, even - I confess - after some further insights such as your own. Of course an airline can do all the market research it wants but ultimately may have to actually launch a service to figure out if it'll work. I'd entirely understand if bmir launched (say) EDI-MUC or LTN-BRU and then later said, "no, we did our best, the forecasts looked good and we did all we could in terms of marketing, but in the end it didn't work." It's just that (recreational pharmaceuticals or not
) they've picked some non-intuitive candidate routes on which to take those leaps.
C.
PS Buster: you're quite right! Presumably though if the parents underwrite the losses they would expect to have some share in the decisions about which routes to launch?