BRISTOL - 4

[flower]

To be fair BRS is a victim of it's huge success and credit must truly go to the marketing team who have turned a small regional into a thriving hub. The terminal though was built for a much smaller throughput of pax and quite frankly it needs doubling in size. It is a chaotic departure system and must be a nightmare to work with. I was also astonished to be told that my small ladies handbag was considered as my one item of hand luggage and i ended up having to stuff it into my normal sized hand baggage item to get through security I have never encountered that before and it seems a tad outdated.

Stone Cold, your company looked after me very well, one is now a passenger who needs additional assistance and your cabin crews looked after me marvellously, just shame you weren't flying on either of the two flights i travelled on

[MerchantVenturer]

In the latest airport consultative committee meeting minutes to be posted on the airport's website the CEO admits that the number of flights now operating from the airport causes logistical problems at certain times in finding sufficient buses.

He goes to on to say that the proposed walkway to the western apron will remove this problem BUT, of course, those following airport events know the local authority has said the walkway requires full planning consent which, unless the airport successfully appeals the decision, will mean the walkway will not appear for a long while, if at all.

Being a user of the airport for many years, the odd long delay awaiting to be bussed to the terminal is nothing new although in general the operation usually works quickly and smoothly, in my experience anyway. Perhaps I've been lucky......who knows?

As for the immigration, like any airport, they are in the hands of the government department concerned as to staffing. When I arrived late one evening a few weeks ago I think there were four desks manned, with a couple of other people (I believe airport or Servisair employees) directing people to the next available desk. In fairness, it took about ten minutes to clear immigration (five or six other easyJet and Ryanair flights had arrived within a few minutes of ours) which meant the wait at the carousel for our bags was no more than a couple of minutes.

Gone are the days at Bristol when it was only necessary to hold out a British passport to be waved through on the nod.

As for the departure areas being congested, the terminal was originally designed for 3.5 million annually, was extended a bit by permitted development to the point where in its master plan the airport reckons it can handle around 6 million or so. We have reached that point now.

Have they now finished converting part of the landside to airside? This should give a bit more space to departing passengers.

The airport does indeed want to double the terminal size but it is two years behind the timescale originally set out in its master plan, mainly because it has to tread so warily in the face of the anti-expansionists who must be the best organised of any UK regional airport's opponents.

The local authority is not helpful, as can be seen by its perverse decision to rule the walkway as not permitted evelopment, despite its own professional advisers believing it is.

So it looks as though passengers will have to endure a crowded airport at certain times of the day for a while longer.

[ATCO1987]

The Landside/Airside boundary change has almost been completed, bar the area of food village and brunel bar which is still under construction.

New security search comb now in use, with 7 Xray/AMD positions (but, as always, with barely enough staff to man them...good old G4S...).

[jaycee10]

Ryanair

Not yet officially announced but general news within the handling agents is that Ryanair will be basing two more aircraft at Bristol from September this year. No news on routes as yet but Ryanair thread lists three new destinations for them.

[Standard Noise]

News travels fast then.
I don't pay too much attention to it all (they're all just yellow & green blips to me) but even I knew that about 2 months ago.

[JulietNovemberPapa]

BRS-GDN-BRS: 3, 7
BRS-SZZ-BRS: 2, 6
BRS-RAK-BRS: 2, 6

So, FR will operate 6 routes from BRS to Poland: GDN; SZZ; POZ; WRO; KTS; and RZE.

[iflycwl]

Over the bridge we here that Ryan Air also showing interest in CWL with new routes soon..................are these true ??

[MerchantVenturer]

I’ve had a look at the FR winter timetable and it looks as though the following flights will operate using BRS-based aircraft.

Bergerac: Mon, Thur
Beziers: Mon, Fri
Bratislava: Thur, Sun
Budapest: Mon, Wed, Fri
Derry: Mon, Wed, Fri, Sun
Dinard: Tue, Thur, Sat
Dublin: Daily (see below)
Gdansk: Wed, Sun
Katowice: Wed, Fri, Sun
Knock: Mon, Wed, Fri, Sun
Marrakesh: Tue, Sat
Milan (Bergamo): Daily
Poznan: Tue, Thur, Sat
Riga: Mon, Fri
Rsezsow: Wed, Sun
Szczecin: Tue, Sat
Turin: Sat
Wroclaw: Tue, Thur, Sat

Interesting that Bergerac and Beziers remain for the winter but not Pau. Porto also seems to have been dropped.

Compared with last winter Derry is down from daily to 4 x weekly (but the same as for the current summer), and Bratislava, Budapest and Riga have all lost one weekly rotation.

However, one of the daily Dublin flights seems to be operated by a BRS-based aircraft (out from BRS at 1600 each day and back at 1825). In total the DUB route sees 25 weekly rotations.

Finally the Shannon (6 x weekly) and the Girona (4 x weekly) still appear to continue to be operated by aircraft from those bases.

The upshot is that at least part of each day will require 3 based aircraft as the timetable currently stands.

Can't help with the CWL rumour other than having read it on a number of message boards.

[Bristol based Taffy]

Continentals woes!

Keeping fingers crossed that Bristol doesn't lose it's flights due to the turmoil occuring over the Atlantic with the Majors cutting back drasically.

Understand CEO and senior management at CO not taking bonus payments this year, to try and help the situation.

Did you hear that Railtrack

[Pandy]

LH booking engine

After my monthly rants about LH not loading fares on their booking engine for DXB/BRS/DXB & the consequences for the FRA/BRS/FRA route, I gave it another try today.

At last the fares appear half sensible, about AED4k (£545) instead of AED13+k being shown before.

So ran it against the EK website for LON. For the same dates this came out AED600 (£85) cheaper over LHR/LGW.

The LH website for DXB/LHR/DXB offers AED3130 (£425).

I'm not travelling to UK for a good few months, so I'm purely did this out of academic interest. I just ran the same dates on the same booking engine.

My question to those that know these things is why (when the BRS/FRA/BRS is reportedly doing poorly) is it about £120 cheaper to connect over FRA into LHR rather than over FRA into BRS? If FRA / BRS was booked solid I'd understand but according to what I read on here its not.

Is it because LH have to undercut EK to get connecting business and as there's no NS into BRS they can charge what they like? I assume they know something of the UK's geography, its not that difficult to get a taxi / train / bus or whatever to LHR and its about cost neutral on their fares.

LH isn't my favourite carrier but I would fly them, so why pay the same amount for a long layover at FRA (not top of my list either), longer than a return taxi / car journey to LHR. Zero benefit

What is the thinking behind such a fare structure (or isn't there any)?

[Pandy]

CO Capacity cuts

Quote from CO News Releases - on their website

As of Sept. 3, 2008, CO will be reducing frequencies in certain markets and will also discontinue service between its hubs shown below and the following cities or airports:

Newark Liberty: Albuquerque, N.M., Cologne, Germany, Santiago, Dominican Republic, Sarasota, Fla., Salt Lake City, Utah, San Jose, Calif., and Tucson, Ariz.

As Cologne's mentioned looks like BRS has survived this round

[MerchantVenturer]

Pandy,

Re LH to FRA, the May stats have now been published and show 9441 used the route last month. If all rotations operated this would give an average load of 51, which represents a load factor in the low 50s% on the Eurowings 146-300.

It appears that the route is building steadily but it does not seem to have been helped by the pricing anomalies. Had the airline used one of their 50-seat CRJs, which was something that a number of people suggested would be the better course, clearly they could not have accommodated all the people who travelled in May.

The other new 'legacy carrier' (SAS) route to Oslo saw 1858 passengers in May, an average load of 72, down from April's average of 78. I'm not sure of the seating capacity of the 737s used (they don't always use the same model variant as far as I can tell) but I would have thought the load factor cannot be any higher than 60% at best.

Ryanair and easyJet continue to slug it out over Milan with neither getting spectacular loads. FR saw 6929 to Bergamo (average load 112, load factor 59%) and easyJet saw 6427 to Malpensa (average load 104, load factor 66%).

It will be interesting to see how long they keep this up. Ryanair have certainly indicated through their winter timetable that they intend continuing daily; we shall have to wait for easy's decision when their winter timetable is published.

Not all doom and gloom though with load factors on FR's Polish routes significantly up on previous months with some well into the 80s% - easy getting similar lfs on their Warsaw and Krakow.

Overall BRS handled 588,705 passengers in May, up 14.3% on May 2007, and the rolling 12-month total is 6,166,818, up 8.3% on the same period last year.

[Pandy]

Thanks MV for your usual calm, measured analysis of the position.

Do you have figures for Newark? thats the one which worries me, only time I use BRS is on the way to IAH - if that goes then its yet more LHR or a nonstop from DXB which @ 18 hours is a non starter - getting old.

Its interesting that the regional figures are still going up, could it be BRS has historically been underserved & its growth is actually (to a degree) coming from (shall we call it) transfers from LHR?

The No 1 on my wish list is a NS to DXB or anywhere within 300 nms.

[MerchantVenturer]

Hello Pandy.

May 2008 saw 8425 on the BRS-EWR (average load 136, load factor nudging 78%), 200 fewer pax than in May 2007.

The route has been building up steadily with 84,000 in 2006 and 93,000 in 2007. So far nearly 35,000 have travelled in 2008, about 800 down on the same period last year. However, April and May figures are still provisional.

For the first year or so it was reported locally, and the airport never denied it, that the route was not attracting US-based passengers in hoped-for-numbers, but now the airport says the position has reversed with more passengers originating in the USA than in the UK.

As a comparison, the CO BFS-EWR that started at the same time as the BRS-EWR (May 2005) carried 102,000 and 103,000 passengers in 2006 and 2007 respectively.

My own feeling, for what it is worth, is that too many locals are still using LHR for their transatlantic travel, given they have an option on their doorstep. I accept that many US destinations from BRS require a transfer at EWR and that LHR invariably provides a non-stop route, but I still believe that West Country people could support the service a bit more strongly. I've put several people onto it who were unaware of its existence (despite good local advertising) and most have since used the route more than once. Perhaps I should operate on commission.

As for the airport passenger figures generally, domestic scheduled numbers have been on the decline for a year or more, mainly through the BACon pull-out. Until this year charter numbers have held up well but last month (the first of the main summer charter season) several charter routes saw a reduced number of flights with others axed altogether compared with summer 2007 (mainly because of the TOM pull-out and the XL Group reducing to one based aircraft) which then, unsurprisingly, gave a significant reduction in total charter passenger numbers.

What seem to rise inexorably are the scheduled international passenger figures with the FR base that opened last November being the major catalyst for the large monthly and annual percentage increases this year.

Of course, raw passenger numbers are not the definitive guide to route or base profitability but consistently high numbers must help.

Some of the BRS punters must be seen as having a few spare quid because a company has just opened a caviar and oyster bar in departures.

[flyerboy]

A couple of months back the local paper had a list of where pax were connecting to from EWR. Houston was top,well since the start of the summer schedules it is now available from LHR so it is not really a shocker that pax are slightly down, 3% last month but it still depends on how many of those 136 are in the front.
As for the charters since last year we have had two major mergers so it's not really rocket science that actual numbers will go down. 4 into 2 means that 50% is about where the figures will or perhaps should be.XL seemed to decide to monitor the situation for a year or so.If you look at the split
between schedule & charter figures it's not quite time to get too pessimistic

[bristolflyer]

The rational at Continental for starting flights to secondary international airports was that it was more profitable than some US domestic routes due to the higher returns of international business class traffic. If this business model is still being pursued one hopes they will cut US capacity before making cuts to European services. No doubt some people are still going to LHR because it is their company travel policy to use BA etc. I've always found the EWR service to be effortless. Well done to the Councillors of North Somerset for a spectacular own goal. FR will still base new planes and in due course they will cost the people they represent money when the decision is overturned. The expanded security area seems to be working well in addition to the new immigration desks. I give the sea food bar six months before it reverts back to "Bar des Voyages"! I've passed through twice since it opened and it appeared the good folk of Bristol were passing up the chance to have a lobster prior to boarding.

[BRS_flyer]

Im out on the Continental in a few weeks and the fare was over £100 less than any options out of LHR or LGW and they still involved a change. At the moment loads are generally consistant but lower than I have seen in previous years, possibly evidence of people tightening their belts due economy etc.

The Caviar bar is apparently doing rather well. Have seen it one afternoon with no spare seats and according to the catering company is achiving a higher turnover than a similar outlet at T5. Not sure how profitable it will be long term but if you think about it, with the prices they charge the break even point must not require that many customers per day.

[Confirmed Must Ride]

looks like CO has chosen new partners..goodbye Skyteam hello Star Alliance

[easyJet Galley King]

Ryanair and easyJet continue to slug it out over Milan with neither getting spectacular loads. FR saw 6929 to Bergamo (average load 112, load factor 59%) and easyJet saw 6427 to Malpensa (average load 104, load factor 66%).

It will be interesting to see how long they keep this up. Ryanair have certainly indicated through their winter timetable that they intend continuing daily; we shall have to wait for easy's decision when their winter timetable is published

With recent expansion at MXP, it would be nice to see that 2nd daily rotation in the morning, allowing for a days work in Milan. This I think would give us the edge over FR, and get the business traveller that the route I think is aimed at.

My own feeling, for what it is worth, is that too many locals are still using LHR for their transatlantic travel, given they have an option on their doorstep. I accept that many US destinations from BRS require a transfer at EWR and that LHR invariably provides a non-stop route, but I still believe that West Country people could support the service a bit more strongly.

Origninally, wouldnt consider the service due to the Skyteam alliance, but with a new move to Star, I could be swayed. However, there is still something I find somewhat claustraphobic about EWR on a 757.....

[Bristol based Taffy]

CO move to StarAlliance

I for one will certainly be considering them in future now they are in the act of joining Star.

Although this normally takes around 12 months to be confirmed and miles can then be accrued.

It would be nice if in place by next Feb