dog in park

Just saw the loads for the BHD bucket and spade routes. lets just say they are good

IB4138

Excuse me pointing out.....It's Friday........

Flypuppy

dog in park,

Define good....

dog in park

Good in like a picture of Angelina Jolie eating a tub of strawberry ice cream with a tea spoon.......

Flypuppy

I was thinking more in terms of load factors, but Angelina Jolie with nothing but a teaspoon works for me.....

dog in park

100-96%
YES some said it would fail.

Flying Wild

Going to be interesting getting out of BHD with a full load.

eastern wiseguy

Mongrel...how's the yield?

dog in park

Eastern eejit ,Don't know but would say fine.

eastern wiseguy

Mongrel


And that says it all......you have as much of an idea as anyone else.....

dog in park

but they are still full! and thats what matters on a first season.

Flypuppy

It isn't. Yield is everything.

I understood that flights to the med were being load limited out of BHD, so 100% load factors are not possible. tech stopping in EMA as well?

Facelookbovvered

The despatch office here have been told that sales on AGP,FAO,ALC are capped at circa 140, think the others are more or less unrestricted so if they sell 140 I guess that's 100%??

I think the plan is to see how it goes, but I guess there will be a sweet spot or perhaps an un sweet spot of wind direction low pressure wet run and male/ female mix that might throw up an RTOW issue.

I think it's fascinating that people who said they'd never sell or start or baby wouldn't last are now concerned about whether they can lift the pay load!

I do agree yield is the key, but without bums on seats you can't manage the yield, again the usual suspects were complaining about baby's prices being high, it's seems you can't win

I see the morning BHD EMA Flybe was canx due fog at EMA at least the 737's are Cat3. It rare not to get in with a Cat2 aircraft, it must have been bad the EMA website shows the FR Dublin having diverted.

North West

Without bums on seats you can't manage the ancillary streams, but for seat yield I'd love to know how you can change it once people have actually booked.

Facelookbovvered

I take your point, but what i meant was that once you've sold say 50% of seats i guess you can tweak the prices up, when you at 75% a bit more and the last 10-15 i guess you can up them again? , but yield is not my department....off course a good % of sales will be through travel agent allocations i guess, the GVA have been.

mart901

If you've filled 140 seats on a 737-300 there isn't many left to fill and having looked at the prices from early on till more recently they have never been exactly rock bottom, I can't imagine them having a poor yield. Interestingly now the "they will be lucky to fill 20 seats" mob are nowhere to be seen now on here. A lot of the seats will be travel agency sold through the association with the Co-op.

righthandrule

If a lot of seats have been sold in blocks to travel agents then there is even less control over yield. Travel agent blocks are sold at the lowest price to make it viable to package the holiday at a profit. Say 50 seats per flight are taken at base price by a travel agent, the airline then has to sell the remaining 98 seats themselves. To capture good early bookings, a good proportion of those 98 seats will need to be sold at a low price to get any bookings at all, really only leaving 10-20 seats to collect yield on. However conversely run the risk of selling the flight all yourself as the airline, the route may be a flop and all 148 seats may have to be sold at a low price to fill the aircraft. Whilst sensible to take allocations to start off, baby needs to sell to the high yielding flight only passengers to actually make any money. Making money on holiday allocations works by moving volumes with very low yield per passenger. Baby is far too small to do this. Going down the leisure allocation route at a new base will guarantee good loads for the first season as generally a new base won't make any profit in its first year. However, anyone can fill a plane by flogging the seats to travel agents, I bet the prices sky rocket next year when they realise naff all was made on these routes this year.

EI-BUD

Imagine, imagine that the market was so plentiful that everybody has good supply of passengers, and each carriers makes a good return.

The fact is nobody outside of the senior people in baby know what the yield is. A few weeks of improved loads do not spell out that baby is making any reutrn at Belfast City Airport, and a while the numbers have improved on Stansted and Amsterdam, there certainly don't appear to be where they need to be and based on the type of fares they are offering (very attractive), it would appear that the yield certainly is not breaking any records. Then again the market is crowded. However, the competition have deep pockets and it was never going to be a smooth ride.

If demand is so strong, why is it that the comparative price on baby to Malaga, Faro etc is so so much cheaper, even when we consider that a portion of seats are allocated to travel agents baby still charging rock bottom on many dates, suggests to me that the demand is not as high as it would appear.

Finally, to me the least of Bmibaby's worries at this time is whether the BHD base is working or not, the fact that the no deal has been concluded by now March 25th (for the sale of) is a big area for concern.

Good luck to one and all concerned. Me, I remain to be convinced that Belfast City is working or remotely close to working in a commercial sense for them.

EI-BUD

INKJET

It is very early days for the Med flights at BHD and with an early Easter this year the loads will get a boost, but the year round stuff is very important, it was that that killed CWL.

The loads on the domestics plus AMS vary enormously and with only one route out of STN marketing is a challenge, this next week see the Tues & Wed rotation to AMS stop apart from the odd few days over the next couple of months where advance booking were strong and this should help the route by pushing pax into either Monday or Thursday or up the road to BFS.

Overall the move to BHD is positive and the numbers on both BHX & EMA are many times better than those achieved at BFS, yield? it can't help but be better when you have 130 bums on seats instead of 30.

eastern wiseguy

A very sensible discussion on yield........however........all of this might be academic if the sale doesn't pan out as hoped.

Is there ANYONE sitting on the sidelines waiting for (let's say) IAG to dump Baby and then pick them up for a quid...a la Chinese and Rover?.

Where will that leave the plans?