Just how large is the demand for day return trips between NCL and BRS anyway? Surely the vast majority of travellers would opt for a longer stay?
More than you might imagine. I used to use the route quite often for day trips (BRS-NCL-BRS) and found a significant number of others doing the same. I believe the route is still the busiest one between two English provincial cities with 174,000 using it in 2014. This is down from the 250,000 pa of ten years ago when easyJet operated 4 x daily on some weekdays which did seem a bit like overkill at the time.
However, the airline then settled down for a number of years at mainly 3 x daily on weekdays (fewer as always at weekends) giving excellent opportunities for day trips before, a couple of years ago, reducing to basically what we have now which is:
Mon 2 x daily
Tue and
Wed daily
Thurs 2 x daily (late afternoon and evening)
Fri 3 x daily (all after midday)
Sat no flights
Sun 3 x daily (all after midday)
Now I'm the first to admit that the airline knows infinitely more about its business than I do but as a mere customer one can't help wonder why they would reduce their service to a point where only Monday provides any sort of opportunity for a day trip (even then very much curtailed especially in Newcastle) and yet, for example, launch Bristol-Isle of Man year-round at 4 x weekly which frankly amazed me as well as some other BRS watchers as we believed that this was a huge overkill on a route that no airline had ever experienced anything approaching a high turnover of traffic. I can't believe the airline made much on this route and now have taken the unsurprising step to reduce BRS-IOM to 2 x weekly for the coming summer.
Looking at the seat selector for the route between Bristol and Newcastle both today's northbounds are shown as sold out as is the first northbound on Sunday, with the first southbound on Sunday and both southbounds on Monday also shown as sold out. Prices for many of the flights in both directions over the next few days are high which I suppose confirms that easyJet's yield management is working even if the actual flight times are of not much use to some of us.
Although there is an hourly rail service between Bristol and Newcastle the journey in each direction takes around five hours which again isn't much help if one wants to travel there and back in a day.
I take the points about APD and aircraft utilisation on routes that turn a greater profit but some decisions, such as Isle of Man, still cause me to wonder.
I find that contacting an airline about specific routes rarely, probably for understandable reasons, elicits anything more than a generalised reply.