I just had a read through the Investor day presentation and it's certainly worth a read:
http://www.aerlingus.com/Corporate/I...esentation.pdf
One issue that concerns me is EI's long haul; on P33 of the presentation, the airline refers to one way pax on various routes, from Sydney (c. 52/day) to DXB (around 20) and from that it concludes that there's insufficient traffic for its own route. OK, fair enough, but I noticed in the Indo this week that there were a few statistics on other carriers for DUB during the year, which told quite a different story from the gloom I expected; far from spinning downwards, a number of the carriers have seen growth, while others have held their own with only a small decline:
"The figures seen by the Irish Independent also show that passenger figures for BMI at Dublin sank 12.2pc to 467,200 last year. The British airline is owned by Lufthansa and recently announced the closure of its Dublin base. Lufthansa's own passenger traffic at Dublin was flat at 240,570.
Passenger figures for Abu Dhabi's Etihad jumped nearly 27pc to 161,000, while those for US carrier Continental Airlines fell 4.6pc to 197,240. Delta's climbed 1.7pc to 260,350.
The passenger numbers for SAS were 5.5pc lower at 225,855, while those for Air France, under its CityJet subsidiary, were 3.3pc higher at 462,500. Flybe's numbers tumbled over 23pc to 123,442"
RE traffic was down 32%, EI down 7% and FR down about 10%."
EY is the star performer, clearly; that's about 220 pax per acft per day, far in excess of the figures published by EI; I'd be very interested in knowing the final destinations of these pax; of AF, SK and LH traffic, quite a significant number connect onwards. It is interesting that in the midst of such a massive recession in Ireland, long haul traffic remained surprisingly bouyant, auguring well for the years ahead - as long as the product is right?
I guess one conclusion one can draw is that travellers prefer other options to LHR (which might explain why BD's numbers have declined so much); the fact that EY has hoovered up a lot of this long haul traffic (being the only long haul carrier flying eastbound from DUB) will have affected the EY traffic.
True, EY has a fair bit of cash behind it (the same people who bailed out Dubai!), but surely what needs to be done to EI's long haul product to make it attractive is not going to be massively expensive - perhaps premium economy class, better IFE, the advantages of a new FFP (preferably if it's linked to an alliance).
In conclusion, it seems that EI's projections for long haul traffic seem to be based on incorrect or incomplete data? Their views are probably coloured by their experience of DXB, which wasn't really their best possible effort.