Bagso and Logohu
Without knowing the dates of Bagso's friends' travel, it's impossible to verify, but it's likely that LHR is that much cheaper than MAN due to seat availability, as Logohu suggests.
Contrary to popular belief, when a flight first goes on sale, there are seats available from both MAN and LHR services at exactly the same price for almost every long haul airline, although the carrier can/will control the number of seats available on each flight at the lowest advertised price.
In the case of SQ we have the added MUC factor. If we assume that half of the available MAN seats are blocked for MUC originating traffic, then MAN to LHR's ratio of seats is 1
, aircraft size excepted.
So the fact that Bagso's friend was quoted a premium to fly from MAN is in fact a credit to the Manchester SQ operation's success. The fact that SQ's yield department feel that MAN can justify a supplement over LHR is again a testament to MAN's worthiness. A sufficient number of people are paying the premium to fly SQ from Manchester, so Bagso's friend would have had to pay extra for one of the remaining seats. And some people will! That's how the market works.