DURHAM TEES VALLEY AIRPORT - 5

[OMGitsDAVE]

I contacted FlyBe the other day to ask why they haven't jumped in to run such a route from MME to London Gatwick:

"Dear Mr ____,

Thank you for your email. I can confirm Flybe will not be starting a London service from Durham Tees valley airport as there is insufficient demand to make the route viable.

In the meantime please accept our apologies for any inconvenience caused.

Yours sincerely
Customer Relations"

[paarmo]

I think everyone has to face facts. MME to London anywhere is not going to happen. Accept this and move on.
Don't you get annoyed with people with made up names and anagrams as names nowadays? Fancy someone called Relations calling their child Customer. Nearly as bad as C. Lion.

[DTVAirport]

bmibaby made LGW work at 1x daily and that was up against BDs 3x daily LHR, so don't tell me that a 1x daily (at least) low-cost LGW won't work now.

What you really mean is, there's no-one to operate it.

[paarmo]

This is today. Fast reasonably priced rail travel to central London.Strip searches at airports and surly bored staff looking into your inner most secrets.Hand baggage restrictions which make anything other than overnight stops almost impossible without hold baggage and all of the waiting which that entails at the London anywhere terminals.Longer check in times compared with walking onto the railway station and boarding the train. Higher costs from niche airlines for the privilege of longer travelling times door to door but with the kudos of telling anyone you meet " Oh I just flew down today ". I think you have got to face facts. Unless the costs of flying drop dramatically and the inconvenience of searches at airports stop.....the chances of both of those things are nil......then flying to the Capital is a thing of the past. Dead and buried. Look forward to the future with lots of charters. That is what regional airports are about. Not Kudos.

[cym]

All realism here please

MME is in the guavo with poor management and a lack of forsight, could be CWL in a years time! Guess the connection

Soz but having used the airport, used NCL frequently recon that the future is not good (nor Orange!)

Bad news but realistic I'm afraid

cym

[DTVAirport]

Paarmo, if all that can stop us from being able to sustain a London route, you'd think it would have severely decreased the capacity on Newcastle - London as well, not to mention Belfast, Edinburgh, Glasgow etc etc etc, and it hasn't, so I'm sorry, but I don't buy that.

Also, why in the rest of Europe are flights from the capitals to the regions thriving?

[paarmo]

The market is not there anymore. The chairmen and directors of companies do not like the indignities at search areas. Senior management now like to look lean and mean using laptops whilst travelling and keeping in constant touch with their offices. ( Complete tossers I know but they have to uphold the image ) Middle management have to justify expense and time travelling. This is the age of austerity if you hadn't noticed. Onward travellers from Heathrow are few and far between. Which leaves who exactly? Facts have to be faced. Easyjet will not look at a flight of less than 250 miles and over that if there is a fast rail link. They are not mugs so if they cannot see it working then the rest of the smaller airlines will follow.
It really is not a slight on the area or the airport, it is simple economics. The airport flourished when they attracted standard air charters to popular destinations and that is the only way forward. Perhaps the Canadians , if they ever arrive , will inject some new impetus into the airport.
All is not lost as recent announcements of new business have shown but the London link is gone forever whether we like it or not.

[skyman771]

paarmo
I am on this occasion in complete agreement, though I do feel that you place undue emphasis on the "inconvenience" factor. What you do not really deal with is that many of pax on the old LHR were in reality simply making connections and as such any inconvenience is unavoidable.
Unfortunately to a greater extent this market also has moved on, not helped by the previous bad publicity re LHR, whether to KL or simply "up the road" where the public perception at least, is that is where the product is available.
DTVairport

bmibaby made LGW work at 1x daily and that was up against BDs 3x daily LHR, so don't tell me that a 1x daily (at least) low-cost LGW won't work now.

Well I'll tell you it wont work now!!, and to an extent you have answered your own point. The ecconomic reality is that the services did not make money, or in all probability the resource involved in providing the services was identified as being able to provide a better return operating elsewhere.
Now why this should have occoured is the real point of all this and in very basic terms an inefficient management failed to market & promote a product to the extent that the service could not provide a better return elsewhere. It's as simple as that !
Now going forwards with the likelihood of large start up costs, increased airport fees, restriction on slots, coupled with little or no grant support, the public perception as to what DTV can offer, marketing retsrictions on promoting connections from a limited service, not to mention the local & national ecconomic problems, then there is NO chance of a return to what were in retrospect MME's golden years !

[taxi_driver]

What are the loads like on the SOU service? If its still in low single figures I would suspect it may get dropped quite soon.

[MME4eva]

Think small!!

I agree, MME-SOU will soon be dropped with anymore cancellations/delays and poor pax figures. Having said that, ironically, could changing it to go direct or tying it up with ABZ-MME-SOU save it as it seems to be LBA's love of fog that's causing so many of the delays. To save the aircraft sitting about, what about pulling Eastern's NCL-CWL in favour of MME-CWL, possibly via BRS?

I too have emailed flybe about starting services to Paris as well as Newquay, Belfast, Faro, Malaga and Nice but they replied they were not commercially viable. Think any flybe route offered from LBA/NCL is not viable but if HUY can get BHD and AGP, why can't MME and then some? Surely 78 pax Dash 8+low fares would be a winner?

As for a London route, forget flybe but what about LCY with CityJet? Good relationship with AF/KLM already and possibility of onward connections into Europe as well as direct (and quicker) service to London? I think faced with 2hr30 train or a reliable plane, most business would still fly.

Also, what about Air Southwest? Could they rework their timetables to offer NQY-LCY-MME or NQY-LGW-MME? This would not rival the current LBA-BRS-NQY or LBA-NQY-PLH as much.

Finally, I notice flybaboo are operating a winter OXF-GVA, could a MME-GVA be viable?

On the charter front, still hopeful Thomson will offer a small but significant flying programme for Summer 2011 from MME to FAO, PMI, AGP, ALC (if Ryanair don't return) and TFS.

All of the above options do not require any of airlines basing an aircraft at MME.

[Flightrider]

If Flybe are not interested - and clearly they are not - then I would think it extremely unlikely that anyone would or could consider MME-London. The economics of operating smaller aircraft into the London area airports are becoming harder and harder to sustain. Gatwick is progressively ramping up its charges with the management's stated intention of getting rid of aircraft with below 150 seats from there in the next five years. It's following Heathrow's lead, and the ramp-up in LHR fees is what led to MME-LHR and LBA-LHR being axed in the first place.

Even before you consider issues about slot availability (Heathrow - not a hope, Gatwick - maybe, London City - maybe) then you have a major economic problem. You need peak-time arrivals and departures for domestic routes where travel times are stacked around the morning and evening peak hours.

For an aircraft like a Dash 8-300 or Fokker 50 carrying about 40 passengers each way in and out (generous), the airport landing and passenger charges are:

LHR £1,396 but subject to a minimum of 18 pax on your aircraft
LGW £1,188 but subject to a minimum of 27 pax on your aircraft
LCY £1,772 but subject to a minimum of 37 pax on your aircraft.

Assuming an average £90 one-way fare including airport charges but excluding APD (which is quite a generous assumption) then you need to carry 16 pax at LHR, 13 at LGW and 20 at LCY on the roundtrip just to pay the airport fees at the London airport. At LCY, that's a quarter of your income gone just to pay their airport fees, before you pay anything towards fuel, Eurocontrol, ground handling, aircraft and crew fixed costs etc.

There may well be demand between TeesSide and London. I wouldn't dispute that. The problem is that no airline can serve that demand profitably because the charges at the preferred London termini are so high. Yes, LTN and STN are cheaper but they are also less attractive to the customer bound for central London.

And before anyone asks how LBA has a Gatwick service and MME doesn't, please refer to the earlier comments about Gatwick's stated intention to further hike its charges to force small aircraft out. LBA was launched early last year and the new owners took over LGW late last year. It is hardly wise to launch more services with a threat like that hanging over you. It's a key part of the reason why the new bunch of w***ers running Gatwick will have unused runway slots at peak times this summer for the first time in living memory.

[planenut321]

Quote : ''what about pulling Eastern's NCL-CWL in favour of MME-CWL, possibly via BRS?''

Your having a laugh Cardiff struggles as it is along with MME. Combined it would fail straight off especially iff MME - SOU don't work

[pug]

but if HUY can get BHD and AGP, why can't MME and then some? Surely 78 pax Dash 8+low fares would be a winner?

Dont quote me on this but i believe the MAG relations with BE are very good at the moment. We have our doubts about BHD though, with DSA having the same route down the road. Doesnt NCL have a fairly extensive BE network too?

[A300BOY]

A300BOY

Just to add to the comments made by MME4eva the Southampton route via Leeds must be in trouble as the Leeds bit gets cancelled all the time so only the pax from Dtv are being carried. I know this is not the fault of Dtv but the weather record of Leeds in the winter should have been obvious to Eastern as these link flights have been tried many times in the past and abandoned for the very reasons we now see.

[skyman771]

Hate to say it on this thread but in reality DTV-SOU was never going to work on a limited frequency, high cost & indirect flight when "up the road" NCL-SOU is being offered at a quarter (or less) of the cost. To add salt to he wounds then as per BE it's doing very well!.
Be it LHR/LGW/SOU/CWL or where ever then DTV has been unable to stir sufficient local support to develop these routes.
One can throw in all sorts as to facilities, ease of access or what ever but the bottom line is that this has to be down to those responsible in running DTV in allowing those with "more savy" at neighbouring airports to pull away.

[paarmo]

Skyman isn't this lack of savvy why Peel are in talks with this Canadian group? If their website is anything to go by they seem to be serious operators and a welcome addition. Mind you websites can be wrong. Look at Excelsis.

[skyman771]

Paarmo - Any talk of why Peel are in talks with Vancouver Airport Services "VAS" has nothing to do with "savvy", merely desperation forced upon the Peel group as a whole by a dreadful ecconomic situation that has landed itself by which has had £740 million written off it's balance sheet since the start of the recession. In such a situation then pressure increases on their debt exposure and poor performing subsidiaries are one of the first assets in line for disposal.
Personally I would not take this in any way as promising in respect of DTV, and interstingly although claimed in a Northern Echo article that it (Northern Echo) claimed that it understood there to be no danger that the airports would be sold individually, then perhaps reality is somewhat different.
It is obvious that Peel would want to offload DTV in any sale package, though the asset value would be an issue due to the land bank attached, though VSA being a management company are focused at investing in and turning around small airports, as such LPL would be the attraction, though I'm unsure as to their attitude towards DSA & DTV. This is not helped when publicity such as a current industry survey which rates DTV the worst out of 300 European airports
Surely if VAS were unable to "cherry pick" prior to an acquisition then it would certainly look to discount the price offered in respect of the acquisition of DTV to allow itself to focus primarily on LPL whilst considering further options (disposal?) in respect of DTV.
One thing does appear certain from all of this is that any individual who has run any organisation that has performed as poorly as DTV over the past few years has led somewhat of a charmed life in retaining their position and as such then my advice would be for KQ to brush up on her CV writing skills.

[paarmo]

Looking carefully at the Canadian's website it would appear that they are managers of airports rather than owners and this is the route which Peel appear to be taking. VAS aquire a substantial part of the equity of the airports group and manage it. The only fly in the ointment appears to be that they appear to attract huge amounts of infrastructure improvements , which are not required in Peels's case , but have not put on record their results in improving passenger throughput.
They do, however, state that they have" a certain management style."
Squeaky bum time for all senior management at all Peel's airports.

[OMGitsDAVE]

Just been thinking about the "newer" services to be launched.
Are the Dublin flights year-round, or are they for a short period over the summer/autumn?

Also, the FlyBe route to Jersey - is this a trial, or will it be on year on year now?

[DTVAirport]

Dublin I believe is all year. Not 100% sure about Jersey but I would guess it'll be a contract lasting anywhere between 2-5 years.