Buster

Regarding the Station and DART.

Going by the previous videos and CGI images of Luton Airports redevelopment I would say no, were all get a good idea of how it will actually look like once that 'fantastic' new canopy is finally added to the front of the terminal extension.

Can't see how it would be a bad experience. I have yet to go on any driveless train that wasn't enjoyable. With elevated and subterranean stations, bridges and tunnels it should be a good experience.

The airport has released a tender to redevelop an existing office building “within the airport terminal complex” and convert it to a hotel which is “within walking distance of the airports terminals”. Work would start in 2019.

Note the word terminals and not terminal. I assume they mean within the CTA but the only office buildings within the CTA are the airports HQ located between the tower and Easyland, which was a former Britannia Airways building and easyJet’s offices that front their hangar.

The airport’s HQ is not a big building in terms of its footprint or height, as there is only one additional floor above the ground floor so would not have many rooms. This just leaves the offices of easyjet who have been keen to move for sometime. Could this second scenario really be the case and that easyjet move out just leaving their hangar to carry on?

Hotels are another of the airports major growth areas. A second Ibis Hotel opened a few months ago with a Marriott hotel under construction now.

Interesting. Of course there is one large office building on airport property that is semi-vacant (Monarch Headquarters) which is within walking distance but would be pushing it to be described as 'within the airport terminal complex'. Is there a link to these tenders or do you have to log in to see them?

https://in-tendhost.co.uk/llaol/aspx/Tenders/Current

Planedrive , this is the link .Hopefully it works.
There isn't much more info than LTNMan has already given.
I tend to think your idea of the Monarch HQ makes more sense, the wording could be a bit misleading.

I actually thought of Monach's HQ and mentioned it in the original post but then I deleted the paragraph when I was this.

https://propertylink.estatesgazette....ormer-in-luton

Seems that Monarch owned their building and the fact that it is up for sale/ to let as an office seems to remove it from the airports tender.

Their other office block is also up to let

https://propertylink.estatesgazette....9-12-387-sq-ft

So we are back to the airport HQ and easyjet

LTN Charter Flights
 

Seeing as TUI is reducing the Luton base to two aircraft this summer from the previous three aircraft it has been for the last 10+ years, I wonder if they are now regretting this move?

If the third aircraft is already allocated to another airport for the summer, it is hard at this stage to go back on those plans. But seeing all these additional TUI "W" flights and sub-charters being added only 4-5 months before the summer schedule starts, would say to me TUI underestimated the demand from Luton, by originally cutting the base down to two.

Traditionally Thomson/TUI has always only used a very small amount of sub-charter flights, and this has usually only been from the quieter regional airports where they might only have demand for 2-3 flights a week for their whole summer programme.

On the talk of summer charters, what the heck has happened to Thomas Cook Airlines?! Last year they announced an A320 base at Luton and when you go to the Thomas Cook Airlines website, you can only book TCX flights to Antalya and Dalaman, which are to be operated weekly to both.

Last year they did something similar announcing 3-4 routes from Luton to be operated by their own metal, and the only route that took to the skies was to Corfu, and that route has even been scrapped this year!

When you look on their holiday booking website, they offer multiple destinations from the airport, but using easyJet for these routes! The tour operator seems to be all over the place with Luton and unsure what it wants to do.

I struggle to understand why Luton fares so badly on the charter flight front, when airports in the Midlands go from strength to strength and the same at Stansted too. The low cost sector has obviously had an impact, but all these other airports have large low cost airline bases too, and you would think Jet2 would especially have an knock on effect to them. But TUI and Thomas Cook continue to have larger bases at Birmingham, East Mids and Stansted to what Luton has.

Hotel.
 

The Pizza Hut building that was signature T2 for a while? Walking distance to Signature and Harrods terminals.:rolleyes:

"On the talk of summer charters, what the heck has happened to Thomas Cook Airlines?! Last year they announced an A320 base at Luton and when you go to the Thomas Cook Airlines website, you can only book TCX flights to Antalya and Dalaman, which are to be operated weekly to both."

Thomas Cook are doing 2 weekly on both AYT and DLM. Both seem to be a321 operated from Manchester.

TUI will be very close to last year seat capacity and maybe even more this year. Many days TUI planes were sitting around compared to this year full of movements plus extra flights being done by W and other airlines.

Not sure what is happening now to Signature's terminal 2 except it isn't being used as a terminal. They keep their lights on though upstairs.

It is that building that stops Taxiway Echo handling anything bigger than a 757.

In my opinion going back to the 80s/90s and maybe earlier LTN overachieved on the charter front which could be by virtue of having Britannia and Monarch's headquarters there. What you're seeing now is a correction, exacerbated by the arrival and massive growth of Jet2 at the three airports you mention which can only draw potential LTN passengers away. There are only so many people to go around.

LTN's strength is also a weakness, in that it's well located for a huge catchment. But that catchment overlaps with STN/BHX/EMA and other London airports. A selling point of package holidays is convenience. We saw that with the massive supplements slapped on regional departures and daytime flights. So for better spread, STN and BHX/EMA would have to be the favoured airports for East Anglia and the Midlands respectively. LTN just gets caught in the middle, but the flipside is that it's very attractive for 'scheduled' routes and that's a much bigger market now.

Luton’s biggest market is London and not markets served by EMA and BHX. Even for my neighbours who live 5 minutes from Luton's terminal when it comes to saving money a trip to Gatwick by road or rail is often made when it comes to IT holidays.

Luton’s position has not been helped by years of summer overcrowding in the terminal, an airport that can take an hour to travel the last mile and a shuttle bus fleet that up until the start of winter was woefully inadequate and is not great even today.

A bad experience is long remembered and for Luton there are a lot of alternatives when it comes to taking the kids away for a two week break.

Luton has fared badly in respect of IT operations for 25 years or more. I suspect the airport authorities, having discovered that scheduled services operate year-round, favour them in negotiations.
Last year, the airport handled over 1,000,000 passengers in November. I seem to remember in the IT years when, in November, there were two commercial departures in a day.

I believe that the office space in the 'Pizza Hut' is being utilised by the airport operator?

I disagree. LGW, BHX, MAN and GLA were clearly the focus. I'd say that compared to other airports LTN did really well. I remember for much of the 90s the entire STN-based IT operation was only as big as Britannia was at LTN.

Where LTN seemed to fare less well was non-IT charters and IT charters for inbound tourists, e.g. the Scandinavian shoppers, Canada (Wardair etc), USA (ATA, Rich International and others), oil flights to Algeria and Kazakhstan, MOD to Bruggen and Munster. They all favoured STN. Some of that was due to runway length but a lot wasn't.

Hotel
So judging by the last few posts are we assuming that the Airport HQ is moving to the "Pizza Hut" building and the current HQ is going to be turned into a Hotel?

I agree that the footprint of that building isn't by any means big and I am struggling to see the viability given the size of all the newer Hotels that have been built on the approach to the Airport.
Then there is the car parking issue, use of the multi storey or the spaces under the Tower!

Thinking out loud does anybody think that Easy might be tempted to move into the old Monarch HQ?

Would it be big enough? Easyjet had to convert one of the hangar aircraft bays into mezzanine floors for offices. They also operate their academy from a separate building and run a fleet of buses between the two and their car park so I guess they would like to occupy just one building

Moving the airport HQ building to Signature terminal two would make sense as no doubt the bosses don't like having to queue to get out of the CTA with the common man. Find it had to see how viable a small hotel would be within the CTA. Most of airport hotels start from around 120 rooms spread over several floors on large pockets of land.

Constellation House turned into a hotel! Blimey!

So how many bedrooms they could squeeze out of here would depend I guess on whether they needed one window or two.

https://i.imgur.com/Wvyf9r6.jpg

For overnight stays? 1 window. They might also have researched whether the foundations will take another storey - or two. It looks like an older builing so it might have been built 'properly' and take a vertical extension. A hotel room I stayed in at SIN a couple of years had a window that looked into a courtyard and was very dark. I didn't care, I was there to sleep for 8 hours.