BMIbaby moving from a great airline of choice to in my view an utter shambles with it's niche break/sand an sun/ teneriffe holiday strategy all around the same time.
Baby aren't exactly niche break: they have routes to business destinations, GLA,EDI,AMS and CDG, as well as a portfolio of Spanish destinations that are more seasonal but they certainly do not range as far as Tenerife or the Canaries.
@S1E
Quite right, that's what happened, they ruined a profitable base as they, British MIDLAND, have a Southern bias. That's of course what happened.
Mainline were the masters of building a route up from a 145 to Fokker to Boeing then putting the 145 back on it just as the loads had grown. They wanted to be in everything: long haul, medium haul, short haul, charter and then ultimately loco with baby.
Problem with that was they did everything but nothing really well: they had good transatlantic loads from MAN and dropped them to go to LHR. They had small bases in the regions and shut them to move everything to a more expensive LHR cost base. They had 3 back offices and systems for the 3 brands: the entire organisation, mainline, baby and regional has close on 3 x the staff per aircraft that Ryanair has: little wonder that they floundered.
Poor leadership: lions led by donkeys.