Originally Posted by qcode
And what was the quote made by the MD of LBA something on the lines of DSA will not affect LBA
I think it was along the lines of DSA shouldn't affect LBA's overall growth prospects. I doubt he's going to be revising that view based on the news that bmi have at last fallen on their sword with the JER route. As Inkjet said, the full service Embraer approach to a route firmly established in the public mindset as a 'low-cost' route was always going to struggle. The irony is, most of the competiton came from bmi themselves with WW running low-cost services to JER from MAN, MME and EMA and the rot had set in long before Thomsonfly started up - year on year passenger number in Jan-Apr 05 were well down on the equivalent period in 04 for example. As it was, JER contributed just 13,929 passengers to LBA's 2005 throughput of 2.6m passenengers - about the same number Jet2 handled to AGP in 2.5 weeks lasy summer - hence I suspect there will not be too many sleepless nights at LBA HQ. If anything, bmi moving off of the route (and hopefully ORK too) will open up opportunities for other carriers perhaps better suited to such routes - which may well make the 3m target easier to reach, not tougher!!
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