I was listening to 96FM Cork, this morning and an email was read out from someone who tried to book Malaga next winter. They emailed Aer Lingus and got a reply saying the Cork-Malaga route was ending at the end of October !!! What the hell is going on ? Dropping Alicante is one thing but Malaga has always seemed popular. Rather than one more Airbus coming to Cork, is it a case of one LESS Airbus in Cork ?
Did Aer Lingus actually say the route was ending. It would be very unusual for them to announce it like that. Perhaps they said the current timetable ends in October and they got misquoted as can often happen. I'd be surprised if they had no sun route next winter bar the two canaries. I know a few people who travelled to Malaga this winter and they said the flights were fairly full. Its definitely not axed fully anyway. It is the Cork bases busiest sun route with daily flights this summer, and summer fares are sky high so I'd say theres zero chance of them axing it from the summer timetable.
I'd also doubt we're losing an airbus, last winter's schedule was very full with few gaps in the schedules. A number of routes would have to be axed/reduced in frequency to fit the entire schedule into 3 planes. The Malaga flights only form a relatively small part of the schedule of 1 airbus. I think we really need to wait and see. Last year there was similiar speculation about some routes being on sale and some routes not but in the end nearly all the winter routes from the previous year returned, they were just a while loading them.
I'm open to correction but I have it in my head that they had 3 ORK-ALC flights during Winter 06/07, which would have been crazy. One or two flights would have been fine.
I think there were actually 4 weekly which was probably overkill, but this was reduced to 2 weekly by January due to lack of demand and there were extra rotations to Paris and Berlin instead. One weekly would probably work, perhaps instead of the Saturday evening Amsterdam as I've heard this is the quietest Amsterdam rotation of the week.