Is it just me that's amazed how critical people are here?
Just to clarify that from an announcement at 22:00 on a Friday, Eastern have been able to find space in their schedules (flights, maintenance, crew) on TWO of their aircraft. They have arranged ground handling and passenger services at 3 airports they don't currently operate into (VLY, BHD, IOM). They have insured that the crews will have also correct documents, to allow performance and airfield familiarisation be available to crew. They have done this in a 48 hour period, over a weekend.
Just purely looking at staff cost, office workers which would usually be off at the weekend, are likely to of had to of come in. Then you have had to find a crew of pilots and cabin crew willing to spend the next week in CWL, and from NCL crew that would be willing to take longer days.
Bare in mind they have also launched these routes with zero marketing or research. Especially the IOM they are taking a risk, that is not calculated.
An airline is not a charity, if the cost of running the route to get off the island right now is £99, that seems cheap to me based on what Eastern would of had to throw at this. You will only get cheaper costs and therefore flights if you have a historically good load factor, more frequencies , or bigger aircraft. If you want that, you will have to use it....or loose it