Originally Posted by
IOMX
And if anybody thinks Easyjet offer good value just take a look at the price they are charging for getting off the island one way between Christmas and New Year at 175GBP!
It didn't cost me anything like that just 2 weeks ago. In fact, there's only one day at the moment where ticket prices are around that figure and that flight is probably packed. The cheapest ticket price between the 26th and 31st is currently £37. All in all, the prices are not so bad considering it's a fortnight away!
Easyjet don't provide an ideal London service from a time perspective. However, leisure passengers don't really care all that much as they can get much cheaper prices if they plan ahead then they could previously. Those flights appear to be packed largely with leisure passengers. Leisure passengers have other options for connecting to Europe (Manchester or Liverpool) or further afield (Manchester).
As far as business travel goes, the business that I work for has been progressively tightening travel budgets to save money over the last 10/15 years. That's common across many IoM businesses. Many of the islands businesses are now under much tighter regulation than they used to be which comes at a price. There is a race to the bottom now in terms of the costs of services provided to end customers. All of that leads to a decreased need for overall volumes of business travel. We no longer have the same level of need to travel as frequently as we once did.
Where we do travel, we no longer want to pay prices that once kept multiple frequency flights running per day to London where there are half empty planes (as was often the case to Gatwick with FlyBe). The government clearly doesn't have money to burn to chuck into subsidising flights on our behalf as an alternative.
There's still a need to have people in and out of London in one day and we still use London City for that with few issues. If we need to connect to other parts of the country then we'll commonly use Manchester. If we need connecting flights non-UK then we use any of Manchester, London City and Gatwick. The flight times aren't always perfect but we generally don't have much difficulty booking flights that get us where we need to be.
I accept that there are a small minority of companies/individuals on the island who need to travel regularly and at different frequencies. But they're in a minority and our island only has the population of a small to medium sized town in the UK.