Porto-Dole
 

Just since April 2012.

It seems as if Ryanair is preparing an attack on the German market - it looks as if in addition to the aforementioned press conference in CGN on Tuesday there will also be two further ones on the same day - in LEJ and NUE. For NUE, this will include a STN route apparently, which is probably not what Cityjet was hoping for.

Dijon 7824ft, Dole 7300ft according to Theairdb but that has been known to show European airports nearest airport as one in Australia from time to time.

Given they opened up the route to serve the significant Portugese population there may be no huge marketing support but just a couple of flights a week.

Ryanair Tel aviv
 

Hi,

Does anyone have any insider knowledge where the Ryanair Tel Aviv service will be operated from? So far, I have heard it might be from Stansted or Milan.

Here's hoping. Alitalia and El Al fares seem to be fixed at remarkably similar prices all year around and are extortionately high.

Stansted - Tel Aviv
 

There are 41 flights per week in November between London and Tel Aviv - I'm guessing there will be more come high season next summer.

El Al won't exit London out of principle. Easyjet are onto too much of a good thing with the location of Luton compared to the residential origin / destination of many passengers. Seems most unlikely that BA would drop TLV from Heathrow.

Is there really room for a 4th carrier and more frequencies on the route ?
Perhaps Milan, Eindhoven, or (if crew overnighting requirements can be managed) Beauvais and Marseille might have more room for capacity expansion...

Reality is that if they were to strat flights from Tel Aviv, Stansted would be included in that. The routes I really want to see at Stansted are Brussels-Charleroi and Paris-Beauvais, both very short routes I know, but very feasible. Something like a minimum of 3 flights and 2 flights each day respectively would certainly work. They have done Brussels up to 8 daily flights in the past. Would also like to see Tallinn as well since EasyJet dropped that route, they could easily do a daily service alongside the Luton service since Vilnius goes daily from both.

Personally would prefer a Stansted-Orly service.

FRatSTN - could you provide a rationale for flying from Stansted to either Charleroi or Beauvais when a Eurostar from St Pancras (Waterloo no more, so easily accessible from north of the Thames) is both fast (2h20 to Paris, 2h10 to Brussels) and frequent, and there are existing flights to the primary airports in Paris + Brussels from a mix of Heathrow, Luton and City. Would be great if you could also indicate the kind of passenger who would choose to fly STN-BVA or STN-CRL, why they would pay a sufficient price to make the flight profitable and why when including the cost of ground transport and APD into the overall fare, they would not find the Eurostar more suited to their needs

Yes, I know that FR flies regularly from Stansted to Dublin, but that route doesn't have a competing 300 km/h train service...

possible new routes from NUE: STN, CAG, AGP, PSA, ALC, OPO

After DTM the 2nd new airport for FR in 2013 in Germany.

davidjohnson6

The passenger who wants the cheapest access to/from London and East Anglia to/from Brussels or Paris and their surrounding catchment areas. Ryanair on a STN-BVA route with passengers getting transport to/from central London/Paris included would still be a heck of a lot cheaper than the Eurostar as well as a STN-CRL route.

But remember, very few people will want to go from central London to central Paris/Brussels therefore people have to travel to the centre of their origin city in order to start their journey by rail, and many people will not want that. Instead people could fly from a local airport to a cheaper alternative location (STN, BVA or CRL) and spend just 50 or 60 minutes of their lives travelling to their destination city (if they even go there at all, they may be going to a more local area, eg. to see friends/family etc. who live close to STN, BVA or CRL).

FRatSTN - I grant you that for some people, a STN-BVA or STN-CRL flight would be the ideal option. Yes, FR can do cheap but are there enough people wanting to fly these route and will enough of them pay a fare above the cheapest possible so that Ryanair can make a profit ?
Eurostar have a train with 750 seats approx every hour to Paris and have over 80% of the market - there's probably a good reason for their high market share.

STN-CRL
 

Ryanair operated STN-CRL from April 2001 (the opening of the CRL base) to April 2004, carrying over 30,000 passengers a month on a few occasions.

The route was re-opened in June 2007 and operated at least twice daily until March 2008, carrying up to 16,000 passengers a month. In both 2007 and 2008 the route achieved an average flown load factor of 56%, giving it the 2nd worst load factor from STN in both years.

The London - Brussels air market has suffered hugely in the last 10 years, shrinking from 1.5 million passengers in 1999 to 0.5 million in 2011.

With Ryanair we've learned never to say never, but I would have thought that having tried STN-CRL twice before and in the context of a market that has all but collapsed, it would be surprising if they tried a third time.

I suspect that their experiences on STN-CRL also explain why STN-BVA has never been attempted.

So many more advantage's of train over aircraft when its a viable option , look what happened to STN-PIK when Euston to Glasgow Central came down to 4 and a half hours .

The train between Glasgow Central and Euston was not the reason behind PIK-STN being stopped. Whilst loads were good the yields to be had were greater on the Bucket and Spade routes out of PIK and hence the aircraft were better utilised doing routes like PMI, TFS , ALC etc.

Im sure the load factor was great ....as there was only 1 flight a day at the end . ;)

How many was there at it's peak 6-8 ?

In the early days there were 10 return flights all designed to try and take market share from BA and BMI. Then Easyjet started up and competition became fierce with prices across all the airlines falling. Great for the consumer but the capacity was too great and yields suffered. FR changed their Scotland strategy in that they centred their European city destinations on EDI and the sun spots on PIK. The UK internal flights just didn't bring the returns so they were stopped. In fact the only one left is PIK - LDY and with load factors of around 55% not sure how safe that one is. The train might have taken a few passengers but as it is still expensive and 4.5 hours I doubt if it took so many as to cause FR to drop the STN flights. Bigger profits on the sun routes.

Besides PIK from Derry, there are still BHX, LPL and STN which are also UK domestic flights. Can you tell me where to find load factors and yields? Or is that just inside information?

On the other subject, two reasons why STN-BVA and STN-CRL have little potential: distance from the city centre (STN, BVA & CRL, ruling out business traffic) and proximity of both Brussels and Paris to the canal tunnel (Making car and train so much faster). FR does operate the very short flights EIN-STN and NRN-STN, which are doing very well, and from December they are starting MST-STN (I have my doubts, route was tried before and failed)

Jorik - yields are not publicly available, but you can find number of passengers each month on (almost) any route out of a UK commercial airport by going to the CAA website and looking at the airport statistics section. Initial passenger numbers for Oct 2013 due to be released provisionally some time this week. Given passenger numbers and knowledge of how many seats were available for sale you can obtain load factor.

New routes from Leipzig are Faro and Pisa (2x weekly). Faro was announced this year but never started - so not really new.