Its deffinately politics stopping a prospective flight. The figures support a flight working for an airline I know for a fact the yield could be there is people swap for the direct flight. Its just beggars belief.
What % of the ME3 are ongoing to Hong Kong vs BA/CX over LHR?
It baffles me that Cathay aren't back with an A340-300, they've still got them and they're paid for by now. Do you mean actual politics or airline / alliance politics?
- Clearly that fifth flight (that might have come to Manchester according to Spanners had the NZ slot not be made available ) has dumped far too many economy seats into that particular market !
London is one of Cathay's top five most profitable routes, they had a chance to build capacity and quite rightly went for it. The slots are currently sub optimal but that will change over time, I am not sure adding LHR is in any way related to restoring a MAN service that was dumped years ago. To the conspiracy theorists who suggest a BA/CX conspiracy to feed LHR, the truth is that within Oneworld, Cathay does not do co-operation. They are
very reluctant partners and they're no friends of BA, co-operation is only now growing since Qantas got into bed with Emirates.
So to be clear, if Air China wanted to launch MAN-PEK next month, there's no real barrier to them doing so? Remember CX walked away over rights to Moscow, hardly an attractive proposition for anyone on their way to connect at HKG.
but the black hole doesn't distort the market does it ? ( the answer is clearly two consecutive letters - anything else and you will be burned at the stake as a heretic) -(Yes copied and pasted so what)
The demographics and population density are reflected in the market behaviour, you are mixing up cause with effect.
Crediting Brahmjee in another place for these boarding numbers
PEK/VIE - 70,000
PEK/BCN - 52,000
PVG/MUC - 86,000
Makes you want to scream !
I assume they each have seven ME3 flights each say, two with A380s to fill? They have a direct service as the don't have non-commercially driven capacity dumping to the same extent. (QR and EY)