Jamesair - just to pick ip on your earlier point yes the privious CEO did move to LBA, I wont mention his name as it always seems to cause a fair amout of abuse. However what he did for the airport was tremendous under his management the airport grew and we gained Emirates, Easyjet, a few Ryanair services and Jet2. Once he left and DL took charge weve gained nothing and lost a great deal he has failed royaly in his job and I would point out again, that in my opinion, he is just not up to the job.
On the issue of Ryanair they do appear to like to use NCL as a 'aircraft filler' for a season or so then move on somewhere else. Both Oslo and Milan had very good loads despite bad flight times. Milan near its end was especially bad when it came to flight timings. So I belive a few routes from Ryanair would work.
On the subject of Easyjet the loads again were good to the likes of Berlin, until has been mentioned they started messing around with times and if a delay appeared in the timetable then Berlin was the route that got the aircraft pulled. I personally had this happen to me on a couple of occasions. With Prague the route was one of the first for Easyjet from NCL and did well from the start and still pulled in good pax figures up to the end. I believe that a less frequent service of 2 or 3 times per week would work. Another route which no one has mentioned is Budapest, Easyjet only gave this one a season and no time for the route to grow I seem to recall good pax figures despite apalling flight times.
No doubt as to where the big hole is in the NCL route network thats France, Germany and the growing economies of Eastern Europe especially Poland. With reagrds to Krakow I believe that Easyjet learned from Ryanair on this one and only did the Krakow route to drive Jet2 off the route and once they had then pulled the route. I can't believe the demand simply dried up in one season.
However the main cause for decline seems to be the airport managements inability to sell the advantages of the airport to airlines. While we are under difficult times during the current recession the decline at NCL seems to be gathering pace and I can't see any light at the end of the tunnel.