Openskies

[BAladdy]

I see that in the lastest COHOR allocation at Orly that OpenSkies has received an extra daily slot. Any idea what for? I see that for the same allocation BA applied for Montreal but were unsuccessful. Was this just back-up for a potential flight from OS?

On the Openskies website there is a press release that was released last giving up to date info on how Openskies are doing.

https://www.flyopenskies.com/press/en_us

The press release says that from June 19th 2008 to the end on May 2010 Openskies carried 155,000+ passenger on it's flights from Paris to New York this gives OS a 29% market share .

BA decided back in December not to sell on a stake in Openskies to another company. after BA reassessed the future of Openskies and decided the subsidiary has a more promising future than originally suspected. BA decided not to sell a stake in Openskies and insisted that Openskies had strong commercial and financial value. BA plans to invest around $40 million in 2010 to expand the Openskies operation.
In the press release Openskies says "the positive results achieved to date have enabled the company to plan for future expansion".Openskies is currently looking at approx 20 different key business destanations and plans to launch it's third route sometime this Summer.

The third route will be launched from It's main base of ORY. Openskies had been strongly rumoured to be looking to adding a ORY/YUL route. EC currenly has at it's disposal enough slots at ORY to operate the flights daily. If you are right and the can't get slots for YUL other destanations that could be added are BOS, DTW, ORD or YYZ.

During the Winter10/11 season Openskies are expected to announce that they will add one maybe two 757's to the fleet and open a new base in Europe. Routes that are being discussed and airlines currently operating them include

BRU - EWR
BRU - IAD
FRA - EWR
FRA - IAD
MXP - EWR
MXP - IAD