Flybe v3?
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Skip - You are so predictable. MAN-SOU was NOT, REPEAT NOT all business travellers. There was alot of VFR on those flights as well (including myself and friends quite frequently). Southampton is not an easy journey from the NW. Accessing Southampton cruises is also a factor. And business travel - whilst significantly reduced (as I said) - is not entirely extinct. Business travel is reduced, not dead. And not all business travel relates to office meetings either. Merchant marine crew fly to join ships, engineers fly to worksites where their specific expertise is needed. Your thinking on 'business travel' is two-dimensional. As for your comment: "We just watched Zombie FlyBe try this! WHAT DID WE LEARN?" - we have just learned that you didn't pay attention, so you need to do your homework before condescendingly talking down to "the MAN guys" with your customary dismissive contempt. FlyBe 2.0 DID NOT offer any presence on SOU-MAN. They never offered that route. Neither were they on the other two routes I highlighted.
Another "much loved" carrier occupied the SOU-MAN route for a while, but they consolidated advertised frequencies from twice to once a day at different times, frequently cancelled flights and suspended services altogether for weeks at a time. All whilst charging fares one could fly MAN-JFK for. Customers who booked them in the early stages soon gave up on them. Reliability tends to be rather important, especially at an premium price point.
Another "much loved" carrier occupied the SOU-MAN route for a while, but they consolidated advertised frequencies from twice to once a day at different times, frequently cancelled flights and suspended services altogether for weeks at a time. All whilst charging fares one could fly MAN-JFK for. Customers who booked them in the early stages soon gave up on them. Reliability tends to be rather important, especially at an premium price point.
Ozzy Osbourne Let me predictably seperate the points out.
MAN-SOU as a daily service operated at x times per day was predicated on high price business travel to make that pay, that's showing no sign of returning to the same level. Hence you might manage to make a once daily rotation on a prop work BUT that's going to have to be at a relatively high price point AND you need 2-3 other rotations for your aircraft out of MAN or SOU. That 1st airframe needs to be kept flying and the obvious candidates out of both airports have an incumbent. Core point being I see no gap in the market that you can monetise linking the niche, unserved routes together profitably.
My point about MAN was it had (ISTBC) the biggest domestic network of all, and that's not coming back as the market has changed. It's not a lack of an airline, it's a lack of enough profitable routes to make a base worthwhile. "Students, leisure and cruise passengers" aren't going to willing to pay enough money to counter the lack of eye watering business fares that used to offset leisure as a cross subsidy to make the flight profitable IMHO.
Let's test it. What's a solid case for a 4 sector day out of MAN or SOU without getting into a fight with an incumbent? In February.....?
MAN-SOU as a daily service operated at x times per day was predicated on high price business travel to make that pay, that's showing no sign of returning to the same level. Hence you might manage to make a once daily rotation on a prop work BUT that's going to have to be at a relatively high price point AND you need 2-3 other rotations for your aircraft out of MAN or SOU. That 1st airframe needs to be kept flying and the obvious candidates out of both airports have an incumbent. Core point being I see no gap in the market that you can monetise linking the niche, unserved routes together profitably.
My point about MAN was it had (ISTBC) the biggest domestic network of all, and that's not coming back as the market has changed. It's not a lack of an airline, it's a lack of enough profitable routes to make a base worthwhile. "Students, leisure and cruise passengers" aren't going to willing to pay enough money to counter the lack of eye watering business fares that used to offset leisure as a cross subsidy to make the flight profitable IMHO.
Let's test it. What's a solid case for a 4 sector day out of MAN or SOU without getting into a fight with an incumbent? In February.....?
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Three points. 1/ assuming Flybe 2 had access to the route performance data from Flybe 1, if SOUMAN was such a gold mine why didn’t they operate it? 2/ EZY SOUMAN? There’s currently nobody on SOULGW and I would have thought that if EZY wanted a short rotation on a MAN or LGW based aircraft that would make more sense. While not as bad as from Hampshire, it’s not great by either rail or road from Sussex to Manchester. 3/ the days when 18 seat aircraft could make money on UK domestics (as suggested above) are long gone apart from where there are some very unique and specific circumstances, primarily a market that must travel and won’t spend all its time complaining that the airline with the Jetstream charges more for a domestic flight than EZY does for a flight to Spain (cf discussions ad nauseum about LM fares SOU - Scotland).
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It's perhaps not my place to comment extensively but Flybe "2" did have SOU-MAN on sale for 2023 - it was then dropped along with the other proposed routes from a Southampton base due to the company-specific factors others have highlighted above.
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Until it was axed mid last year, I used the MAN-SOU flights twice a month to go to my company office on the south coast. Despite the highish prices, and despite Eastern's shoddy reliability (I had my longest EVER flight delay on a MAN-SOU flight last spring) it was still way more convenient than the train or driving. And despite the fact it was only running once a day, the flights were getting busier with each passing week. Eastern's exit from the route was an odd one - it was right before the frequencies were due to go twice-daily, and coincidentally it was right before their Air France routes to Paris Orly began. I did my final return flight to Manchester right before the route ended and it was pretty much full.
As mentioned above, FlyBe2 had begun to sell tickets for the route, but the airline collapsed.
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Not sure what to make of this. Looking at the website, it appears to have been set-up by a Netherlands-based company called TDA Design, which looks to be owned by a couple of young graphic designers who are working in/hoping to work in the airline branding sector. They have the usual social media feeds, but with very sporadic postings, the 'Be Regional' scheme was posted yesterday, but their previous posting was in 2022 and the two individuals appeared to be visiting an commercial aviation exhibition in Hamburg.
At the very best I would suggest it's just a 'kite flying' exercise, but I think it's more likely just to generate some interest in their design business. I think if there was sufficient pent-up demand for more regional connectivity, the existing operators (Loganair, Eastern and Blue Islands) would be going all-out to raise the finance to acquire the assets necessary to expand to fill this need. Yes, there are a few key routes that would be ripe for an operator to jump in, but I personally think that the days of fast turboprops and small jets frantically criss-crossing these islands with a spider's web network of routes are long gone.
At the very best I would suggest it's just a 'kite flying' exercise, but I think it's more likely just to generate some interest in their design business. I think if there was sufficient pent-up demand for more regional connectivity, the existing operators (Loganair, Eastern and Blue Islands) would be going all-out to raise the finance to acquire the assets necessary to expand to fill this need. Yes, there are a few key routes that would be ripe for an operator to jump in, but I personally think that the days of fast turboprops and small jets frantically criss-crossing these islands with a spider's web network of routes are long gone.
This is turning into quite an interesting thread.
AirportPlanner1's write-up of the Southend operations looks bang on the money to me - the jets were a disaster zone in almost every possible way.
There indeed wasn't, but I think the main person to blame for that was the investor who had a fixation on the Heathrow slots and being able to recover value from them - which was never realistically going to happen. It's not really fair to blame people on PPrune for that one when it was a hare-brained scheme long before anyone on PPrune got to ever hear about it.
If we take SOU-MAN as an example, Flybe generally had 5 x daily services. Four of the five met the hub banks at Manchester with connections to ABZ, INV, IOM etc and also had connections from MAN via SOU to the French regional points which were barely served from MAN at the time. Between all of that, a chunk of traffic will be connecting which isn't there today. You then have a reduction in business travel - it's still there, but there's less of it. At very best, you might get to 2 or 3 a day in today's world when you strip all of that out.
That's probably the most obvious of the unserved routes and not enough to base a new business on. Yes, you have EMA-GLA/EDI - which Flybe had dumped anyway before ceasing trading - and bits like Cardiff, MAN-EXT and so on. What do you then have? A disparate bag of routes, none of which are a bedrock and with little or no operational or marketing synergy between them.
The other issue here is volume. If volumes on many of the ex-Flybe routes aren't what they were - and if easyJet are doing well at LTN, BRS etc then they'll fight to retain that traffic, and fight on price - then you're into flying smaller aircraft. You need higher fares to make that work. You cannot run a Q400, ATR72 or whatever is your weapon of choice at A320 low fares - you'll go bust (again) if you do. There's no middle ground between those things and if you think there is, that's where you build up a business and then easyJet come and sit on top of you, just as they were doing to Flybe 1 on BHX-EDI/GLA and they're now doing to Emerald, Loganair and others.
A great many of the comments here might be true in isolation, but I still don't see anything here which you could knit into a cohesive business which makes a profit. And that goes for ecoJet just as much as for Flybe 3.
AirportPlanner1's write-up of the Southend operations looks bang on the money to me - the jets were a disaster zone in almost every possible way.
As for "Zombie Flybe" the reason for the collapse was a lunatic CEO who had been told by "experts" (a couple of contributors on here spring to mind) who told him there was a fortune to be made out of LHR and AMS slots. There wasn't
There are definitely opportunities for unserved citypairs and routes that are being milked.
MAN-SOU was NOT, REPEAT NOT all business travellers. There was alot of VFR on those flights as well (including myself and friends quite frequently). Southampton is not an easy journey from the NW. Accessing Southampton cruises is also a factor. And business travel - whilst significantly reduced (as I said) - is not entirely extinct. Business travel is reduced, not dead. And not all business travel relates to office meetings either.
That's probably the most obvious of the unserved routes and not enough to base a new business on. Yes, you have EMA-GLA/EDI - which Flybe had dumped anyway before ceasing trading - and bits like Cardiff, MAN-EXT and so on. What do you then have? A disparate bag of routes, none of which are a bedrock and with little or no operational or marketing synergy between them.
The other issue here is volume. If volumes on many of the ex-Flybe routes aren't what they were - and if easyJet are doing well at LTN, BRS etc then they'll fight to retain that traffic, and fight on price - then you're into flying smaller aircraft. You need higher fares to make that work. You cannot run a Q400, ATR72 or whatever is your weapon of choice at A320 low fares - you'll go bust (again) if you do. There's no middle ground between those things and if you think there is, that's where you build up a business and then easyJet come and sit on top of you, just as they were doing to Flybe 1 on BHX-EDI/GLA and they're now doing to Emerald, Loganair and others.
A great many of the comments here might be true in isolation, but I still don't see anything here which you could knit into a cohesive business which makes a profit. And that goes for ecoJet just as much as for Flybe 3.
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TDA Design (owned by a well-respected aircraft parts broker of the same name) has been contracted to provide this branding, with no actual involvement in beregional, and the decision to publicise their involvement at this early time was in fact made for the opposite reason to that suggested above - namely to gain more interest in beregional. It's been made very clear in all of these posts that any illustrations are purely for show at this stage.
MAN-SOU as a daily service operated at x times per day was predicated on high price business travel to make that pay, that's showing no sign of returning to the same level.
Hence you might manage to make a once daily rotation on a prop work BUT that's going to have to be at a relatively high price point AND you need 2-3 other rotations for your aircraft out of MAN or SOU.
if SOUMAN was such a gold mine why didn’t they operate it?
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I can see that domestic routes with problematic surface alternatives such as MANSOU could support a morning and evening rotation to get what business traffic is out there. However surely the real problem is what to do with the aircraft between those trips. Thinking of regional route pairs that would be profitable with a late morning/early afternoon service would be much more tricky.
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Always amazes me this fixation with the "day-return" business passenger as it's one of the biggest fallacies out there. You only have to look at the prices charged to realise that most business routes have passengers staying at least 1 night which is why the busy flights happen to be out Mon/Tues morning and back Wed/Thu evening.
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Always amazes me this fixation with the "day-return" business passenger as it's one of the biggest fallacies out there. You only have to look at the prices charged to realise that most business routes have passengers staying at least 1 night which is why the busy flights happen to be out Mon/Tues morning and back Wed/Thu evening.
