Originally Posted by Railgun
But a full aircraft does not always mean the route makes a lot of money
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You aren't seriously suggesting that Emirates introduced a second service as a charitable gesture are you? Fact of the matter is that BA's overheads are much higher than many of the Middle and Far Eastern long haul carriers (certainly in the way they calculate the way costs are distributed around the company) and therefore the revenue that they need to generate on a particular flight to make it profitable is likely to be higher than say Emirates or Qatar.
BA's problem was compounded by the fact that their business class seats were much more likely to be filled by travellers on a point-to-point itinerary, rather than flying from MAN via places such as AMS or FRA onwards.
I often return to the example of Lufthansa - years ago they seemed to treat Munich in a similar way to how BA treat Manchester. However in recent times they have changed it into a significant long haul hub in its own right, with the following on today's departure board, mainly with A340s: Newark, LAX, Chicago, Boston, Charlotte, Washington, JFK, Tokyo, San Francisco, Beijing, Tehran, Delhi, Shanghai, Hong Kong, plus a much wider range of feeder flights from around Europe. Interestingly their mix of foreign airlines is very similar to MAN - several US carriers, Emirates, Qatar and Etihad from the Middle East, etc, plus the mix of charter flights.
However in pax numbers Munich are ahead - 15.69 million in 1996, 23.13 in 2000, a drop back in 2001-2 like everywhere else, up to 28.62 million in 2005. In comparison, Manchester had 22.4 million in 2005 up from 14.65 million in 2005 - the difference in growth over the period where Lufthansa ramped things up is stark.
My take, although there are many others here far more qualified to comment, is that Lufthansa are succeeding at Munich for 3 main reasons - they have built a large number of feeder routes up with CRJs (50 and 70 seats), which have then progressed to larger aircraft allowing the smaller ones to be used on new destinations. These feeder routes have been used to build a significant long haul portfolio to the extent that they have got into a virtuous circle - growing short haul feeding into growing long haul. The second reason is that they have used their Star Alliance partners to build the range of services. This is in stark contrast to the way in which BA have used their One World partners at Manchester - if rumour is to be believed they have been more interested in getting them out of the way so as to allow more feed into Heathrow. Thirdly, Germany is a lot less focussed on one city generally, compared to the London focus in the UK.
Whether things have now gone too far for BA ever to consider trying the Munich model at MAN is debatable - I would say probably. It would certainly take several years patience and a large investment to turn things round, and BA (like many UK companies these days) seems to focussed on short term gain to ever consider such a plan.