The way forward...................
Taking up bobsyeruncle's point about easyJet and Ryanair at BRS, and indeed the means to march towards 7 mppa and beyond, the context can often be usefully set by looking back.
easyJet is now responsible for about half the BRS passenger numbers and Ryanair about a fifth. In any business it's not normally a good thing to rely on a tiny number of major customers; only this week we've seen what this approach has done to a mobile phone company. However, in the regional airport business, especially the medium size and smaller ones, it's so often the only way if sufficient footfall is to be achieved to make the airport viable.
In 2001 Go recognised the potential of an under served region that possessed both a vibrant and substantial business market as well as a large pool of comfortably off people, often older and retired, who had the means and desire to fly frequently for leisure. easyJet continued to expand the Go network when it purchased the former BA low-cost airline and built up a based fleet of 12 A319s by 2008. The recession then intervened and without downsizing much easyJet marked time at BRS in terms of overall rotations, although winters began to see more parked up aircraft for parts of most days and still do. The same applies to Ryanair. From 2010 airport passenger numbers have risen slowly but consistently every year and easyJet now bases five A 320s and six A319s which is broadly the same number of available seats as in 2008.
The point was made about Cdg. easyJet does regularly sell out on this route early; already four inbound and three outbound rotations are 'sold' out' in the next six days - a common occurrence this summer on BRS-CDG-BRS. Furthermore, easyJet operates mainly 319s to Cdg although two days each week now seem to be A320-operated as against one day each week earlier in the summer. The fares in GBP that are available for next week are mostly into three figures per sector, well into three figures in many cases. It must be presumed that the airline is very satisfied with this yield and has no wish to dilute it by adding extra flights, although it did operate 2 x daily on some days a few years back, then in competition with AF ATRS that ran up to 3 x daily. The only acknowledgement that easyJet is currently making to the pull-out of AF last spring is to operate daily next January instead of 4 x weekly as has been the case in recent Januarys.
Ryanair set up shop at BRS at the beginning of winter 2007/2008 although it had flown three routes (Dublin, Girona and Shannon) for several years beforehand with aircraft from other bases. The base fairly soon became five aircraft but last year it was reduced to two, reportedly because of a failure to agree various charges with the airport. Ryanair maintained its schedule last summer using aircraft from other bases. This summer there are three based aircraft with other rotations operated by aircraft not based at BRS. Ryanair has reduced the number of summer and winter rotations at BRS from the high point of three or four years ago and more than easyJet will axe routes and begin new ones at the airport. On many of its routes it commands extremely high load factors, eg this summer the months of May, June, July and August have seen load factors of 94% and above each month on all the Polish, Lithuanian and Hungarian routes, frequently between 96% and 99% per month. This of course doesn't necessarily guarantee airline approval in terms of yield and there are recent examples of FR routes being withdrawn at BRS despite very high load factors.
At present then it's hard to suggest that easyJet and/or Ryanair will step up to the plate more substantially at BRS. If they don't who will drive the passenger figures forward as has inexorably been the case for the past 50 years?
Coupled with the apparent stagnation of easyjet and Ryanair is the fact that BRS's annual increasing passenger figures since the recession have been achieved against gradually diminishing flight numbers through a combination of larger aircraft and higher load factors but there will come a time – soon I suspect – when rotations will have to increase markedly for the growth to continue.
History suggests that BRS will somehow find a way of keeping the momentum going. Since 1961 CAA stats tell us that there have been only eight years where passenger numbers have fallen against the previous year, invariably at a time of recession or other significant negative event such as the collapse of Court Line - 1967, 1968, 1969, 1974, 1985, 1990, 1996 and 2009. Even in the days of the 70s and 80s when BRS was city council-owned and a drain on the rate payers' pockets the passenger numbers generally increased year on year although they were then counted by abacus as 300,000 per annum was not reached until 1983.
It will be extremely interesting for BRS aficionados to look back in ten years' time to see if the growth was maintained and how it was done. One thing seems certain: it won't be a walk in the park.