Suggestions that the charter market is dead and buried are wide of the mark. I've just extracted the CAA passenger data for August from their site and it reveals that 4 million passengers were flown on short-haul charter services to/from the UK last month. 25% of these passengers were flown to/from Manchester which at close to 1 million passengers represented 40% of the total passenger throughput at MAN. Of this million, over 400,000 were travelling to/from spain and the canary islands, 250,000 to Greece, 100,000 to Turkey and 75,000 to Cyprus. So whatever we might think is happening in the low-cost arena, there is still a sizeable market out there for package holidays and spain and the canaries still contribute a significant proportion of the market. No doubt this market was bigger prior to the low-cost boom, but one can't deny it is still a very big market - 1 million passengers per month is 90 return trips on a full A320 every day, probably meaning there are around 30+ based charter aircraft at MAN to run that sort of programme.
At LBA only 60,000 charter passengers passed through in August,, compared to the 1 million at MAN which is in no way reflected of relative catchment areas. When you consider that LBA's 60,000 was well above HUY, DSA, LPL etc then it shows just how much MAN dominates the market for this type of operation. By contrast, over 240,000 passengers were on short-haul charters out of NCL, yielding 4 x times the passenger throughput of LBA. Interestingly, short-haul non-domestic scheduled passengers at LBA were nearly 200,000 passengers which were 10% higher than NCL. All of which reinforces my long-standing belief that the lack of charter pax at LBA isn't because of lack of demand, or because people won't choose to fly from LBA.
Unfortunately TOM represented almost 50% of the 60,000 charter passengers at LBA, so their loss is a big one. It means less choice for local passengers for whom the self-tailored option is not right for them and reinforces the MAN stranglehold on package holiday bookings. But they have made a business judgement here so let's respect that and companies do not generally walk away from profitable routes or bases. It remains to be seen if new owners are installed at LBA whether any connections with the major tour operators might reverse the trends and whether a profitable way can be found to exploit the huge leakage to MAN. Personally, I'm sceptical.