I am always deeply cynical about an airline which claims to be providing a niche regional service but has a picture of what looks like a 737 variant on its home page, but let's put that aside for a minute:
we chose London Southend as our south of England airport due to the high speed rail links
Come on! Beware of airlines named Express, and even more wary of airport "express" trains, of which the train serving LLS-SEN most certainly is not!
However, there is a very good express rail service (shame about the rolling stock) connecting AMS with Rotterdam Centraal in just less than 30 minutes.
So
why fly to RTM instead?
1) Very short taxi times - especially compared to landing on the Polderbaan
2) Tiny terminal compared to vast AMS.
3) Still closer to city of Rotterdam, Europort and The Hague - easy to jump in a taxi to these destinations if business is paying.
First question is - can a route be sustained on this basis? I don't question that there is demand from all the airports discussed above to get to these locations, but the Ranstad region is effectively one very well connected city, with AMS at its centre.
Clearly, there are enough people who appreciate the advantages of RTM for the LCY route to be popular, and I see BA are also starting an LHR route. That is London. Very large population and business needs.
For anywhere else, AMS seems to work perfectly well, and it has the additional advantage that routes which would otherwise be wafer thin are feeding connections to elsewhere.
There is a long standing ABZ-GRQ bmi regional route, but can this really be compared to RTM? I just don't see it - GRQ is a good 2 1/2 hours from Amsterdam.
Rotterdam isn't just a port - there is a fair bit of finance industry in the city centre, and I would guess this traffic would a) generate better yields and b) still use LCY or LHR -
never SEN.
I'm not getting excited about this one.