I think the flight supplement comparisons done above is a little difficult to compare, as others have mentioned.

Tour operators base their basic prices for a package usually from a "London Airport", and not necessarily Gatwick...

Gatwick usually has far more frequencies of charter flights to the popular destination likes of Tenerife, Faro, Palma, etc... Maybe flying 4-6 times a week and only once or twice a week from Luton.

The NIL supplement flights will usually be based on the most anti-social flights to the destination, which are going to be the least popular. For example a flight to Palma departing a London Airport at around 10-11pm and flying back from Palma at 3am.

Due to the shear number of flights and frequencies from Gatwick these flights are more likely to be from there.

Did you check other flights from Gatwick for the same week to the same destination and hotel? As they may have had a flight to this destination on another day with an even lower supplement from Gatwick than the Luton option.

I see there was a departure to Southend today on the departure board. Would this be a proving flight for a new service from London Luton to the east coast? :E:E

On weather cancellations, just looking at the weather forecast for the next week, there could be significant disruption to services both from Stansted and Luton, if not at the other London airports too.

Substantial snowfall expected due to "the beast from the East"; an extremely cold air setup coming down from Scandinavia.

Schipol are already cancelling services tomorrow morning.

That far out forecasts are inaccurate. Beast from the east is a figment of weather spotter forums !

Kursaal Flyer!

How about the Bear to the west?

Can't see any snow forecast at Luton for the next 7 days! Nor Southend or Stansted, maybe a little in Norwich.

Been snowing the last 20 minutes, never trust a weather forecast. Lucky it was drizzling before hand because these big flakes would have set by now.

Over on the IOM thread, it's reported that FlyBe are stopping LTN-IOM from early Jan. If true, will this affect LTN-JER too?

LGS - the Luton-Jersey is also suspende from early Jan to end of March

Any ideas what the big news from Easyjet will be at Luton Airport tommorow?

Maybe it is something to do with this. A snippet taken from the Anglia TV website......

"Luton-based airline easyJet is launching a plane with a team of Santa Clauses to celebrate raising over a million pounds for the children's charity UNICEF.

The money was raised through passenger donations and will help the charity protect mothers and children against seven deadly childhood diseases, including tetanus".

M

EZY & UNICEF
 

The UNICEF coloured Airbus was sitting on apron yesterday.
Latest news - easyJet plc

Damn...

Got my hopes up for some big announcement, of new routes or expansion from the airport...

Don't get me wrong, the UNICEF thing is great news for the airline and charity, but was hoping the news would benefit the airport and possibly be growth.

Re IOM by coincidence I was looking at Luton to IOM for late January but Flybe web site shows nothing after 07/01/13.

--
Nick

BE IOM
 

I think it restarts on 12th April

Looks like the Airport operator has submitted an incomplete application for expansion to the council for approval.
Thus nothing until next year now!?

'incomplete application for expansion' - does that mean they did not include the plans for the 4 runway in the application !!!!!!

Why of course not, only the two runway one but it got lost as it was done on the back of an old £50 note and was mistaken as a bribe!:E

More info here Luton Airport operator submits incomplete application - News - The Comet

I think the NIMBYs are clutching at straws at this one. I dare say incomplete applications happen relatively often and a resubmission will have no impact on the validity of the bid.

As for The Comet - should they really be fronting a campaign like that? Whatever sells papers!

>>I think it restarts on 12th April

Ahh thanks, flights for mid-May are there, pity that won't help my mid Feb. need.

--
Nick

Reduced Demand or Increased Competition?
 

It is unfortunate, that airlines continue to reduce domestic services from Luton. As an example passenger levels for October to the IOM from Luton were down 32% when compared to last year (loss of 631 pax) whilst Gatwick increased by 32% to handle an extra 3,532 pax which possibly is due to Easyjets new service. 'Reduced demand' therefore is misleading? Luton's management need to offer 'real incentives' to attract new carriers before we end up as London's white elephant!

November provisional stats:

ATMs (v LY)
November 4,852 (+4.1%)
Rolling year 71,945 (no change)

Passengers (v LY)
November 617,432 (+3.2%)
Rolling year 9,615,526 (+1.8%)

Comparators:
EDI down
BHX up
STN further down.

Put your bets down for when it breaks the 10M again?

Not quite correct there, the monthly total was up 6.2% on November last year V Luton 3.2% Stansted: Airport

I think the airport will be scraping under the 10 million mark for another year, and any increase in number (if any) will be minimal.

Sorry to sound pessimistic, but its not like so far we are seeing a whole raft of new destinations and additional capacity being added to the airport.

We are seeing the usual tweaking of schedules for the summer, with easyJet offering new routes to Olbia and Mykonos, but like usual there doesn't seem to be any new aircraft and just cutting the schedules of other routes to accommodate these.

It doesn't look Adria are coming back next year to fly the Ljubljana service, also with loosing the Aer Arrann services and FlyBE cutting theres for several months. This will be a drop of several thousand a month.

If you look at the Thomson brochure, the flight programme for TOM doesn't look at busy as previous years. With fewer destinations and frequencies the the Costas, etc...

I think Wizzair is likely to be the only airline to grow at the airport next year, and to be fair to them I think this will be less than previous years, they are focussing growth at present out of Budapest... To continue their dominance as a replacement to the now defunct Malev and replace some the Ryanair routes, after the airline reduced their services from there recently.

I do however notice Monarch are continuing the Rome and Munich services. But again, I don't think their is additional metal to fly these routes and just a tweak in the schedules.

You can have too much of a good thing. I think Luton is ticking along nicely in most areas and passenger numbers are around the right level to max out the terminal for some of the time without causing too much overcrowding. Spare capacity will be needed when work starts next year on upgrading the airport as no doubt there will be areas closed off for building work.

The airport needs to look at why Gatwick is so popular when all things are equal in getting to and from both airports, as it is clear that passengers have a clear preference for Gatwick over Luton and it isn’t difficult to see why.

One area of concern for me is the airports rail link. Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted, London City and Southend all have stations at the airport while Luton does not but these airports are not without issues.

Gatwick with its two terminals means that many passengers have to catch a shuttle train to swap terminals so they can get to the station. As the shuttle runs every few minutes this isn’t a big deal but it still adds to the total travel time as there is another component to their journey.

Stansted involves an extended rail travel time for what is basically just a 32 mile trip to the capital.

Southend is even worse with even a longer journey in both distance and time and a service that many passengers just can’t use because the rail operator only operates for around 18 hours a day in each direction with no early or late services.

Then we come to Luton with its 24/7, 7 trains an hour rail service to the capital with a travel time in as little as 22 minutes and a direct link to London stations that most airports can only dream of. The big issue is the shuttle bus. There used to be 4 high density flexi -busses used for the service and it used to be free. Now it is down to just 2 flexi-busses with 2 standard busses and the cost is £2. Gone are the days of just jumping on the bus as many passengers who don’t buy through tickets have to queue to buy a bus ticket.

Also while the airport station can be reached non-stop in 22 minutes this is an hourly service operated by East Midland trains. This needs at least doubling in frequency as the service is so good.

Both these issues seem to be the airports weak link.:(

On the positive side, Are not El AL increasing capacity?

Also met with a friend on Sunday who had a great experiance with Wizz & Luton airport. He lives in Reading and uses all London airports all of the time on business (not Luton in the past). From arriving at gate to stepping into his car parked at a friends house in South Luton he said was 20mins! He said he has told his company to use Luton more has he was very impressed compared with LHR & LGW! Ok he had no hold luggage and was lucking having free parking a couple of miles away but he said he would spread the word, he works for a multi-national with 5K plus UK employees.:ok:

Yes . From March, 6x wkly throughout the year, increasing to 11 x wkly for the summer peak. This means that in certain weeks of the summer, there will be up to 20 flights a week to TLV, when you factor in easy flights as well.

Also the new Wizz Lublin service started today.

monarch

new destination for winter 2013/14 from luton.
sharm el sheikh 3 x weekly

I thought LTN-SSH was already being operated by ZB? Perhaps on an ad-hoc basis?

Nope. easyJet operate scheduled services to Sharm from Luton. I cannot remember Monarch operating charters there from Luton.

EZY & TOM have been operating LTN-SSH.

Merry 'Buster' Christmas

http://i45.tinypic.com/17bgis.jpg

Too U2! :-)

Flew from Luton for the first time in many years this week and landed last night.

Thoughts: -

Fairly pleasant check in and departure areas, security was reasonably smooth despite being a very busy time (morning of 24th Dec). However, duty free and eating areas did not have enough seats to accommodate everyone and people were forced to sit on the floor. Gate areas as I would expect from a Lo-Cost base (like Liverpool).

Arrivals made it look like a third world airport. A longish external walk in the cold wind to a door, then up stairs to a shabby corridor and down stairs again to a bare UK Border hall. Welcome to the UK?? It seems domestic arrivals have a better route, but how many domestic arrivals are there?

Why no covered walkway to the car parks. In both directions we were cold and/or wet walking to/from the terminal. If Liverpool can manage a multi-storey, surely Luton can?

But you still get wet walking to the terminal if it's raining.

Hopefully your issues will be addressed during the airports expansion work which should start in 2013. There are certainly new seating areas being created airside once the terminal is expanded and work will also be carried out in the arrivals to also expand that area.

Does anyone know what happened with one of the EZY's yesterday? Saw it surrounded by fire engines at one point...