A320 be be based at SNN and SNN-LHR to go to 3 x Daily
(more or less back to where SNN was 2 years ago before Belfast..what was the point in all that..regardless of what people thought about the base at belfast they got some serious negative publicity over the SNN-LHR route
vkid; The issue was that Aer Lingus wanted to have an anchor route as it were at the new base and to create scale, ie a popular route, and a mechanism to put Aer Lingus on the map as being an operator at BFS fairly quickly. In addition, the end product is that Aer Lingus has a vastly cheaper cost to operate at Shannon.
I think that EI have to operate as a commercially viable outfit and if there has been overcapacity at SNN over the winters for them to axe the same routes makes sense. However, if a large amount of capacity is removed from the market (ie Delta to JFK) then they can see it is being viable.
Moreover, going out with a press store such as Shannon routes axed, the story could be percieved as JFK route may be saved..Already today commentators are saying hopefully we can get JFK route saved. Its quite a clever stroke, avoiding the type of negative press that it did when the Heathrow link was axed in 2007!
EI-BUD