Southampton has for a long time been a bit of a hub for flights from south east UK to regional France. Apart from Rodez, Southampton has summer seasonal flights to Brest and Toulon, neither of which are served direct from London. Other small regional French airports served from Southampton include Avignon, Bastia, Bergerac, Biarritz, Chambery, La Rochelle, Limoges, Perpignan and Rennes. There's an awful lot of wealthy people living in Berkshire, Surrey, Hampshire and West Sussex with 2nd homes in French villages or who like the snob value of rural France
There are a number of other factors that might encourage this:
- Routes from the UK to small regional French airports often do not have sufficient profitable passenger demand to fill a 150 seat aircraft. Rodez is a charming town for a stroll but it is little known amongst the UK public and in the middle of nowhere - we are not talking Nice or Marseille
- The terminal at a small French regional airport may not have the capacity to handle a 150 seat aircraft.
- Until Stobart began flying ATRs from Southend, the charging schemes used by the likes of Gatwick were often economically prohibitive to aircraft with less than about 150 seats