SEN-GRQ 18x/week in S18?
Some people on a Dutch forum pointed out that for Summer next year, starting Sunday 25 March 2018, much more flights between Southend and Groningen are loaded into the Flybe booking system.
On weekdays, there are three return flights, on Saturdays 2x GRQ-SEN and 1x SEN-GRQ and on Sundays 1x GRQ-SEN and 2x SEN-GRQ. So that means 18 (!) return flights per week, up from 8 last summer and 6 this winter. Based on the timings (first departure from GRQ at 7:10 and last arrival at 21:10), it seems they plan to base an ATR in Groningen.
For the first week (i.e. the last week of March 2018) all these flights are bookable, but for the rest of the Summer season they are loaded but "Full or not enough seats".
Does anybody know more about this? The passenger numbers on the route are increasing (slowly but surely), but the planes are far from full (I think on average about 50-60%) so tripling the number of flights seems excessive.