JET2 Where2 next??
 

Does anyone know if JET2 plan to operate any new services from LBA to UK points other than just BELFAST INTERNATIONAL? The rumour of a NEWQUAY service appears to have died a death and the rumour of a BELFAST INTERNATIONAL second base appears to have died a death. Can anyone shed any light on this?

Services operating from LEEDS BRADFORD INTERNATIONAL this summer by JET2 bellow.

LEEDS - MALAGA (Twice daily)
LEEDS - AMSTERDAM (Twice daily)
LEEDS - BELFAST INT (Twice daily)
LEEDS - PALMA (Daily)
LEEDS - BARCELONA (Daily)
LEEDS - ALICANTE (Daily)
LEEDS - NICE (Daily)
LEEDS - PRAGUE (Daily)
LEEDS - MURCIA
LEEDS - VENICE
LEEDS - ALGARVE

from YORHSHIRE:ok: the place to be is the City of Leeds.

My best bet would probably to add a base at Bournemouth, as this is the base I believe of parent company Channel Express and also beside the Dublin and Girona flights by Ryanair, it is one of the few remaining airports in the South West without a significant low fares airline presence.

Out of Leeds-Bradford, I would presume the airline might try to add one or two new business cities, perhaps Paris and Frankfurt with two flights a day and one or two more leisure cities with one flight a day like Naples, Madrid or Mahon.

For a low cost airline their aircraft seem to spend a lot of time parked up at Leeds, i drove by there today (SAT) and there was five parked up at mid day and only two of them seemed to be open. Not much really for a Saturday.Still i guess they can park em for nowt at Leeds? :ok:

There was some mention of an LGW service a while back. Is that still on the cards?

Don't think they actually applied for LGW slots, but either way they dont have any. I'd have thought Paris would be a good bet but they'd have trouble getting slots no doubt, same goes for Frankfurt.

Keep your eyes on BFS, BRS, EXT and, maybe, BOH !!!!!!!
Who knows for certain ?

Apparently there's a big channex truck at BFS to be used for the re-roll between pax/ night mail. Plenty of Pilots have been interviewed for a BFS base and they're recruiting cabin crew for BFS this month. Having said that, I havn't heard if anyone has actually been offered a BFS contract yet.

Can't see Jet2 doing Paris. bmi already does CDG and bmibaby has threatened to flood leeds with bmibaby if jet2 competes with them. I think jet2 would have a hard time competeing with them. That said flown jet2 a few times and excellent service. Good luck to them i say.

Are they making any money? thro Leeds again this morning and at least four parked up on the ramp, funny way to run an airline, still it makes Leeds look like an airport.:O

I think they said they did'nt expect to make money over winter but overall for a first year I think they'll end up in the right area. 2004 will be an interesting year as they will have 6 based ac so to turn a profit would be a great achievement. I hope they do but my main worry is them being gobbled up by one of the major loco's a bit like Go/Buzz were.
LBA with an established set of loco routes would be tempting for both Easy and Ryanair but with BMI mainline and Regional operating I believe Baby would be thrown in if that were to happen as, as Baps says, Jet2 haven't gone head to head on any BMI routes yet. You'd bet the majors would though.
Having their ac parked at LBA for next to nowt during winter is better than running routes at a loss and ensures the winter schedule runs on time, this is something Jet2 are very good at and partly why they are doing well in their first year.

Seeing alot of metal on the ground on a Sunday morning isn't unique to either Jet 2 or LBA! Alot of UK airlines operate 'slack schedules' on Sundays - particularly in winter.

I have to admit though that Jet2 have, up to press, always kept alot of capacity in reserve. Their first full Winter was always going to be an unknown and prudence seemed to be the name of the game. This summer should see that change, however it appears that slot availability has put a block on some 'nice to have destinations' - there appears to be some spare capacity in the programme.

Tonight though (Sunday) for Jet2 sees at least 4 of the 5 units earning their keep with arrivals at LBA as follows;

LS266 MALAGA 2010
LS294 BELFAST INTL 2050
LS206 AMSTERDAM 2130
LS198 PRAGUE 2155

...and I'd reckon that with the exception of possibly the BFS those flights would be fairly full.

Having too many aircraft (if such thing exists) is not a problem here I guess. As they were able to buy a lot of aircraft out of Ansett when they went belly up they have some time to get them through maintenance, train crew etc.. If you buy them at a good rate having too many is not a problem for a straong company like Channel Express.:ok:

Maybe an idea for NOW to lease aircraft of them :p :p :p :p

But to answer the question BOH should be a good base I guess.

Ok

Jet 2 have not gone head to head with BD however they have with KLM on the Ams Route .

Yes i know KLM offer connections .

I have flown both airlines LBA - AMS in the past months and both seem to have a good load factor .

I say sack BD on the BRU route and bring in SNBRUSSELS ......

Not just Brussels how about Paris? Also they do go head to head with FlyBE on Belfast even if FlyBE go to City. I'm surprised FlyBE are still getting reasonable loads as they have an awful on time record from LBA unlike Jet2. They also are not CAT3 unlike Jet2 and they operate a turboprop on the route. Still there's no accounting for taste. Good luck to all these airlines and long may there be choice ex LBA for a change.

I doubt jet2 will take many passengers off flybe as they haven't off klm. At the end of the day flybe offers 4 flights a day to Belfast and that means flexibilty to business passengers for basically the same price and they end up close to the city centre. i know which I'd prefer. KLM's loads have not gone down at all since Jet2 started because again they have more flights a day with AMS connections and god knows they're better than LHR. Plus once again the price isn't that different apart from when Jet2 have their £1 specials. Perhaps they should concentrate on providing new destinations rather than competing with established carriers and that way everyone will have somewhere to go for their holidays.

Whilst its inevitable that slot restrictions at some of the major airports will mean that Jet2 might struggle in practice to fly the schedule they would like, I can't really think of too many instances where this would be much of an issue for Jet2.

CDG is one good example though - I don't think there is much argument that the capacity offered on LBA-CDG at the moment is below a level which the local market could support. It's not that there's anything wrong with bmir's 3 x daily ERJ145 service as such, but as neither a feeder service for Air France or a particularly cheap alternative to Easyjet ex-LPL, it has become something of a niche operation. Passenger throughout is currently 60k per annum and heading south and is well below LBA-AMS and LBA-DUB which now run at about 250k per annum each. Given the markets are roughly about the same, that gives you an idea of the size of the opportunity. I'm sure Jet2 would love to have a crack should they manage to obtain the slots. Whatever hypothesising there is about how bmi might react, its worth bearing in mind that they would struggle to find the aircraft and the crew to 'flood' LBA with bmi babies, even if that is what they wished to do (which I doubt).

As for the other slot restricted airports on the continent, I'm not really convinced by the case for 2 x daily 737-300s to places like FRA, CPH, MUC etc. Ironically enough, these are much better suited to bmi and their Embraers, especially with the added traffic the Star Alliance feeds.

Therefore if Jet2 do try and move into higher frequency, shorter runs, it will interesting to see how they do it. The domestic market is an option, but is difficult to judge the potential given the fairly central geographic position of the LBA market. The overall volumes of travel to/from West Yorks to places like Edinburgh, Glasgow and Bristol are significant, but the question is how much of that market would switch from road/rail to air and what fares would trigger them to do so. Certainly the way passengers have responded to lo-co services on EMA to GLA/EDI and NCL to STN show that it can be done, one presumes at a profit.

Jet2 might of course choose not to move into the shorter sector runs - afterall the financial success of the venture (at least so far) does not seem to be dependant upon working the aircraft particularly hard. That said, there is still a level of unutilised capacity in the summer 04 schedule that I'd be surprised if they didn't find a use for.. From what I can tell, the aircraft that goes to Murcia each weekday morning at 11:00 is free beforehand, the FAO and VCE services only operate on a part-week basis and so are free on the other days, whilst Saturdays and Sundays seem to have plenty of windows to fit some additional sectors in. Therefore there's the opportunity to fit in some additional weekend flights to the main 'sun' runs and dabble with a new destination or two in the week, so long as it suits a Mon, Wed, Fri type operation.

On a wider note, I have been a bit surprised that Je2 / Channex haven't found a way (or aren't interested in finding a way) to use their surplus LBA capacity in the package holiday market. For all the talk about CDG etc, some of the thickest routes in the summer out of MAN are to places like IBZ, MAH, CFU, MLA etc which must be heavily subscribed to by the Yorkshire market given the token offerings from Tui / First Choice / Thomas Cook etc. It's somewhat ironic that whilst significant numbers head over the hill to catch these services, there's a fleet of 737s sat doing nothing overnight and at certain times in the day. A case of supply and demand not quite meeting it seems. I'd be particualrly interested in running shared services to places like IBZ, MAH etc with Jet2 block-selling a % of the capacity to a tour operator and selling the rest themselves on a scheduled basis. Would seem to be fairly low-risk to both parites and for Jet2 a good way of opening up sun routes that are still evolving as seat-only destinations and that otherwise wouldn't stack up on a stand-alone basis.

682

MLA is crying out for low cost airlines from UK. Channel Express had a 737 land there before Xmas. I emailed Jet2 but they denied planning ops to MLA this year.:sad:

Slot availablility seems to be the perenial problem of most airlines, especially newcomers. I would consider CDG to be a prime target for Jet2 given the mix of year-round leisure and business passengers going to Paris.

LBA is underserved for routes/capacity to Paris as shown by the routine 20,000+ per month LPL-CDG, 10,000+ EMA-CDG, 40,000+ MAN-CDG and NCL-CDG has recently surged up to 15,000+. LBA-CDG rattles around at 4-5,000 pasengers per month, and as 682ft points out is showing a decrease on corresponding months for 2002.

With LoCo services ringing the Yorkshire area you can bet many Yorkshire punters are heading West, South or now North to take flights to Paris.

It's worth noting that the addition of Jet2 services to AMS has ADDED 10,000 pax per month to the route. KLM load factors have stayed close to or sometimes above those of 2002. Of course load factor does not always correlate to profitability but empty seats earn even less. While demand for sand and sun routes vary across the year Jet2 LBA-AMS has been very consistent. For long term stability and growth a couple more such routes must be a good thing. The Jet2 pax may lack onward connections but I know that many business travellers appreciate the later evening return than offered by KLM which can avoid the need for an overnight hotel stay.

That last point was always the strength of the Sabena/DAT service to BRU (as raised by King Dee) with an early morning departure and late final return service allowing single day business trips. bmi regional's BRU service has barely attracted 30% of the peak monthly totals of Sabena (10,000+) shortly before their demise, frequently even less.

682ft raises an interesting suggestion of Jet2 using overnight aircraft downtime to run services to resorts in the Med and part selling seat blocks to package holiday companies, boosting ex-LBA IT capacity while not lumbering the IT company with the cost of basing/operating etc its own aircraft. This would probably require a significant increase in crews though. Do any other UK LoCos run anything similar?

PTH

I see now Flybe is "Yorkshire's Low Cost Airline" according to the adverts!!!!

The hottest rumour is that jet 2 are comming to the south at Bournemouth