Murcia also runs through the winter only to be dropped in March.

I have noticed it on a few of the 'late winter additions' - Gatwick to Warsaw is one, and routes like La Palma are always late. Looks to be parts missing at the moment rather than not operating.

The airport closes to commercial traffic after that I believe

Flights to Murcia are being sold by Ryanair out of Stansted and Luton (check end of May)

The main differences for 2019 compared to 2018 (at the time of the early summer schedule release in each case) seem to be that the SEN fleet will be 2 x A319 and 2 x A320 in 2019 compared to 3 x A319 in 2018, there are 79 weekly flights compared to 62 and that 15 destinations will be served compared to 12. The twice weekly MJV seems to have been dropped while ALC increases from 7 to 10 x weekly and FAO from 8 to 10 x weekly.

https://uk.advfn.com/stock-market/lo...ement/78294445

Am I reading it right that the expanded Flybe franchise has not delivered financially?

Looks like it:

" At London Southend Airport, the Group has focused on improving awareness through branding and marketing, route development, and airline incentive deals to accelerate its growth. During the financial year, we accelerated the previously announced GBP30m to GBP40m investment plan, principally in relation to the franchised airline business, to enhance the value of the airport through an increase in sustainable and profitable passenger numbers. The introduction of Ryanair flights in Spring 2019 is the next step in the growth of our London airport. This significant long-term partnership agreement is expected to result in at least one million additional passengers in the first year and more than five million in the first five years The agreement with Ryanair gives us further confidence that we will deliver on our aim to welcome five million passengers a year to the airport by 2022. The investment in the franchised operations from London Southend Airport has contributed successfully to the attraction of other airlines to the airport. The results of the Aviation division for the full year, excluding the investment in the franchise operations, are expected to be broadly in line with expectations."

Although it may well have cost a good deal it does seem to have successfully attracted Ryanair and Adria. Maybe other airlines will follow them.

Aren't the 190's leased rather than bought? Have any ATR's been purchased this year - the new 42?

Stobart have bought 3 E195s and leased 2. It has been expected that the leased aircraft would be returned as the purchased aircraft were delivered, but right now Stobart account for five in total. The last two purchased aircraft are at Exeter with delivery of one seemingly imminent. The third aIrcraft is due in November. I think the only ATR purchased in the last year is the ATR42-600 which is Dublin based mainly for the Donegal PSO..

I know you don't much care for speculation Tagron, particularly when it is ill informed, but Stobart have obviously purchased the E195s for a reason, and you would think utilising them in a way that helped SEN grow towards their own targets would be a priority?

Ha ha Dave you are right, I do speculation of course but preferably in private. Seriously though I do not know what to make of the present situation either. Stobart indicated right from the purchase announcement that one intended use of those E195s was ACMI work. Now they are advertising for pilots for a Dublin-based operation (ACMI apparently) of E190s while at SEN they have enough crews to run three E195s. Developing SEN traffic has certainly been a priority but at the end of the day ACMI work will surely generate a more certain revenue stream than starting up more new routes at SEN. And it can hardly have helped that this years operational difficulties are likely to have generated costs far beyond budget.


Several posters have opined that its now "job done" at SEN with the arrival of Ryanair. I am not so sure. The Stobart routes appear to have performed very well in terms of passenger numbers but thats not necessarily a statement of satisfactory revenues. To pull the operation now before it has reached its true potential and without a replacement operator for the uncovered routes could be seen by the market as an admission of failure which could deter some.possible future operators. There are surely other "development" routes they could try in the interests of broadening the base and the diversity of the route network. Some have been rumoured. If the attitude is "well we have got Ryanair now so its all going to be OK" then I can only say best of luck with that.

So there are two conflicting scenarios. What I think is there must be negotiations ongoing with various parties that have not yet reached a conclusion. But of course the existence of negotiations is no guarantee of a satisfactory outcome.

I think the ATR operation and the Embraer operation are two very different things that must be appraised separately.

The E195 operation was clearly a door opener to attract carriers with A320/737 equipment by demonstrating that carefully selected routes have potential from SEN for an airline with slightly larger aircraft, but a much better sales force than Stobart/Flybe. I don't think that Stobart ever planned to operate those routes longer term. It was either a miss with the route getting scrapped or a hit so that it could be offered on a silver platter to a larger airline. After all, airports earn most of their money with passengers in the terminal, not aircraft on the apron.

The ATR operation is different as the routes are mostly to tertiary airports with no/little air services to the UK. There is no apparent airline which could take over those routes after some warming up by Stobart as most of the routes can only be served, volume-wise, by regional aircraft and there are very few airlines left in that category. So I guess Stobart will keep those routes if the overall calculation shows that getting those passengers into the terminal makes sense for Stobart with regard to its SEN airport ownership even if the routes as such do not generate a profit for the airline. The problem is that there is little room to expand that operation as the number of potential destinations that are small enough and near enough for an ATR72 is somewhat limited.

Tagron

I agree with most of what you say. I think that some of the new STK/BE routes that were launched were marginal in terms of long term success while others showed real potential and that potential has been realised with the result that RYR and EZY have taken them on for the future. I also think that the costs of launching the routes has been much greater than anticipated and this is alluded to in the Stobart Trading Statement. The MAN route in particular may never be able to turn a profit and this was much discussed, externally and internally, at the time of its launch so I don't see much prospect of that continuing under another brand. What the SEN-MAN did prove is that there is sufficient demand within the catchment areas for the route at a certain pricing level. What surprised me was that at the same time that it became apparent the route would not continue next year they increased the prices, whereas I would have expected that a period of selling at the new prices would be allowed to elapse before pulling it, just to see if it the market would absorb the price increases.

Like you I had expected Stobart to now identify a second tranche of routes and this could still happen next summer if one of the E195s remains SEN-based, which I'm hearing is the current plan. Also I would have expected the ATR routes to continue in 2019. Both of these things really need the BE/STK franchise deal to be continued beyond June 2019 to achieve maximum effect; the brand could change to, say, Loganair but that would entail expensive awareness marketing and short term traffic loss perhaps so would not be ideal. As you suggest I think there must be negotiations going on with perhaps more than one potential partner and this is the cause of the delay in releasing the Spring 2019 timetable.

It's certainly no surprise that there is speculation regarding the outcome of all this and that is surely inevitable so the sooner something concrete is announced the better for all parties concerned.

Pardon my ignorance but on what basis is Stobart's Aer Lingus operation? Is all economic risk with EI, so white label-style flying?

The most straightforward solution to keep the SEN operation alive would be to simply use the Aer Lingus brand with Stobard taking the commercial risk/franchising it. At least on the continent it would make relatively little difference if Aer Lingus or Flybe flies from, say, Groningen to Southend. Not sure how it would be see in the London catchment area, but IIRC, EI has offered flights from the UK to third countries in the past (from LGW?), so apparently not a big no no. Aer Lingus would be, if you ask me, a more helpful brand on the continent than Loganair. Theoretically, it could even be used - if SEN-DUB is kept and suitably timed - to offer some one-stop connections to/from DUB that otherwise are inaccessible by air (e.g. Groningen, Caen, Antwerp).

virginblue

As far as I know the financial risk for the Aer Lingus Regional route network is largely with Stobart Air. There may be exceptions where it makes economic sense for EI to ask EIR (STK) to take on an existing route but others here perhaps have the definitive answer.

What I would say is that the original plan, in 2014, was for the SEN routes to CFR, RNS, GRQ etc. to be operated under the AER brand but for some reason this did not happen and the deal was then done between STK and BE which currently expires at the end of May 2019. Maybe whatever precluded the EIR deal going ahead four years ago does not now apply and we could see EIR branding on the SEN routes. Definitely the uncertainty over the future of these routes which currently exists needs to be resolved as quickly as possible.

How has Malta been doing with KM?

Is it seasonal and are the stops in CAG and Sicily also popular for pax?

Interesting, thanks. So if Stobart uses the brand and assumes the commercial risk it is more or less a franchise operation just like BE@SEN. Not sure why they went for the BE brand at SEN in the first place. Maybe EI was unwilling to franchise its brand for an UK-based operation - or it was more expensive than BE. With the exception of the domestic destinations where Flybe has a sizeable presence, there was relatively little to gain from the BE brand as most of Stobart's destinations do not have Flybe services.

Maybe it was that EI in the end thought allowing the franchise to extend to routes which had no Irish link was a step too far, but it would have been logical from the STK point of view to do it that way I would have thought.. I feel that the BE/STK franchise was perhaps the less preferred option at the time although it was obviously not touted as such by STK and did work out quite well as it turned out.

rog747

From a pax numbers point of view I should imagine that KM are quite pleased with their SEN adventure on all three routes. The routes are not seasonal and are on sale for the whole of next Summer. I think CTA is slightly more popular than CAG this summer. One passenger's experience of loadings I saw this week said: MLA-CTA was "full" and all but 24 of the pax disembarked there and the CTA-SEN was also "full" on departure. As far as I know KM are the only operator that offers Business Class on their flights from SEN.

Not sure if this ever got off the ground, but apparently EI did at least plan to set up a base at LGW with flights to Malaga, Munich, Nice, Vienna, Dublin, Knock, Faro and Zurich. That was back in 2008, but their ideas about stretching the brand to include such operations might very well have changed later on.

Aer Lingus set up a small base at Gatwick in spring 2009 - included routes to Munich and Nice. I think it lasted about 12 months before being closed down

I honestly wouldn't want to run flights in the UK in that market any way other than under the flyBe brand. Not having any brand awareness has been the undoing of CityJet (and many others) in a post-travel agent world. There is limited room in people's memories for brands, and flyBEs is widely known, well advertised, and harmlessly neutral.

That said, an excellent second choice would have been Eddie Stobart, with green planes and adverts on lorries...

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Pretty sure it was that autumn I flew Gatwick - Vilnius with them. Everyone I knew asked why I flew via Dublin when I could have got a direct flight from Stansted. They definitely had an inbuilt image problem ...

While I would agree for pretty much all UK markets, I am not so sure about London. Flybe is a relative newcomer at LCY and LHR while LGW is down to one route these days. I don't think it is a much stronger brand in the London market than Aer Lingus.

IAG might well have also some influence if any of the potential destinations are served by group members!

Flights to MJV in general are expected to transfer to Corvera when the former closes next year but perhaps there is still some uncertainty on this. I expect the 2 x weekly flights from SEN will be released in due course because the only two spare slots in the EZY Spring 2019 schedule are exactly those that are used to operate SEN-MJV this year.

There are no spare slots to allow a SEN-based aircraft to operate SEN-BUD so I wonder if that is indeed being dropped or will it operate on a W-pattern still to be released?

This got me thinking about the fact that BA itself works with franchise partners in the form of Sun-Air and Comair. Is there anything ruling out a 'British Airways operated by Stobart Air' operation?

There is nothing to prevent that. You're getting warmer!

SEN-TFS

Does this flight operate without payload penalties? Has it ever had to do a refuelling stop en-route?

But hasn't BA cut back franchising its brand to other airlines significantly in the past? They used to have BMED, GB Air, Loganair in the past, for a long time it has been just Comair and Sun Air.

Do COMAIR/SUN AIR have suitable sized aircraft for the size of SENs runway?

Sun Air does. It operates Dornier 328 aircraft including from LCY.

......getting colder.....wait until November.

Loganair/BMI Regional?