Thank you Ozzy. I was rather drawing on my experience in banking. It is the norm there to routinely ask clients of competitors for their business and there are no barriers to customers moving from one bank to another. In the name of competition however, RBS has been instructed to reduce its market share of business accounts and customers are actively encouraged - and incentivised - to move elsewhere.
The pool of business customers in the UK is vast and the risk to any one bank of losing a few customers is small.
However, airlines are certainly moving in the direction forecast by MOL a couple of years ago and are consolidating to a small core which between them will hold great market power. When I posed my earlier question about regulation, I should have indicated that my interest was around the potential for the market to be distorted by both a small number of airlines and a small number of airports. Given the high number of recent failures, perhaps a reduction in choice is inevitable.....as long as it isn’t on the back of retrenchment to the Big Smoke as alluded to above.

On a more positive note:

https://www.theguardian.com/business...e_iOSApp_Other

Liverpool Airport were bases for Easyjet and Ryanair prior to them arriving at Manchester so those airlines were not attracted away from Manchester indeed neither have expanded greatly at Liverpool since that happened. I very much doubt Liverpool Airports management ever expected Adria to begin their proposed operations considering their financial situation, of course we are not privy to negotiations but I cant really imagine why Liverpool Airport would go after an airline in such dire shape. Wizz and Blue have only ever operated from Liverpool and of course they will have to offer them attractive rates but there will be a limit to what an airport the size of Liverpool can offer compared to its much large neighbour same for LBA which as far as I know also hasn't attracted any business from Manchester airline wise, with Jet2 growing very slowly if at all there.
If Manchesters financial dominance allows them to offer much lower rates than Liverpool and indeed any other northern airport, I'm not sure how this can be considered a benefit to the region as a whole or passenger.

We are basically left with less choice and a growing monopoly at one airport not to mention job losses. I don't accept the lower fares argument , weather you fly from Liverpool or Manchester or Leeds they are all competing and would have to therefore offer attractive fares otherwise many passengers would just use Manchester if the fare from there was so much less.

If Liverpool looses its main carriers to Manchester due to anti-competitive pricing, I fear for Liverpool Airports future, which I believe to be highly detrimental for the travelling public and the loss of a northwest asset.

VC10...if you were a boss at EZY looking to make considerable savings, in light of the current situation, would you say it is sensible to have bases 30 miles apart, with the duplications of costs that creates, to essentially serve the same catchment area ?

As for you point on competition...multiple airports serving a route has an effect obviously, but so does multiple airlines serving the same route from just one airport - which is what we will see at MAN with LS, EZY, RYR and maybe Wizz UK. If in worst case scenario the all switch to MAN (highly unlikely) then we wouldn't see mass price rises. Worst I can see from a pax point of view is a few may have to travel a smidgen further. The bleak side is the effect on LPL, but as many have said above this type of thing was always going to happen, and already is...just look at what LGW has lost for one example.

Consolidation at one base would appear to be nailed on.
it's a new world compared to 12 months ago.

EZY will be obligated to make best choices for its shareholders, 2 bases 30 miles apart is a nonsense in this climate when airlines are fighting for survival.

It might be unpalatable but going bust is worse !!!

What significant duplicated costs are there?

Staff in all posts except flight / cabin crew. Probably some offices etc aswell. I'd say that today every penny counts to every airline - all will be looking for savings wherever possible.

It is slightly more than a smidgen, if I leave my office at Seaforth to get to Manchester Airport for a flight after work, I will need to allow two hours to do that to allow for possible hold ups, plus check in. As far as I'm concerned it bad news for Liverpool Airport and the 5M who chose to use it and Liverpool City Region in particular and the NW in general. With respect to considerable cost savings, this can only be from very low fees to squeeze Liverpool out.

I think we also need to remember as well. There'd be quite a lot of job losses and a detrimental effect to the local economy if Liverpool were to lose even just it's Easyjet base.

Don't think anybody on here is urging that PDXCWL45, just asking the question if you were EZY would you think the overlapping bases could be more cost effective. I have little doubt from an EZY point of view consolidation would be the cheaper option.

My understanding is that EZY crews are largely self-administering and there are very few if any staff or offices on site at airports. If you do consolidate, you surrendering market to your competitors who can offer more choice. You also lose the adavantage of playing operators off against each other.

in particular in bound tourism which once we get out of Covid is significant, having no air services to Liverpool would have a massive effect on this.

MAN is 30 miles away, which is hardly putting the Merseyside / North Wales ares out of reach. Economic issues (job losses etc) are valid comments, MAN being too far for tourists to get to aforementioned areas isn't really.

Not so, city break visitors are not looking to add extra travel time to Liverpool city centre, the 30 miles away sounds close , but it doesn't translate in travel time. Anyway maybe it wont happen as you said.

Also people looking for city breaks might not necessarily know the airports are close together. They might Google city breaks for Liverpool see not many flight options and look at other destinations.

This is a concern.

If "they" wanted to consolidate at Manchester- there is always the compromise of operating W pattern flights from MAN or overseas based aircraft into Liverpool.

On the subject of discounts to easyJet & Ryanair I'm sure Jet 2 & TUI would have something to say about that. I doubt it would be feasible to maintain an airport the size of Manchester without income from landing fees. There is a limit of how much you can rip people off with drop off charges and how much Duty Free you can flog, often at a higher price than regular discount shops.

Whilst I suspect this pandemic has a way to run yet, EZY took a position fairly early on with long term cost efficiencies by closing bases as STN, SEN and NCL. It would appear they have looked at the near term future as best as anyone can and put measures in place to reduce overheads - they are currently anticipating operating at around 20% normal traffic levels over winter.
Any "sweeteners" from airports may see the traffic return quicker in those places next spring but I get the impression EZY are battening down the hatches now whilst planning for the longer term in the remaining bases. It is always possible that the situation could take a turn for the worse over the winter and they would then need to revisit the base situation again but for now, I personally don't think this will happen.

A number of points raised here. Firstly, I have made no assertions concerning which airline operated from which airport first. It seems irrelevant to the points I addressed in my earlier post. Indeed, LPL was absolutely dominant in the no-frills sector for many years, so they have shown that they are able to compete very effectively in this space without an artificial 'leg-up' from a regulating authority. LPL continued to do well in the no-frills sector right up until C-19 brought the entire market grinding to a halt. With reference to my earlier post, the point I made was that EZY and RYR did play their MAN and LPL bases off against each other over a number of years and presumably benefitted from doing so in the form of more competitive terms which they could pass along to their customers. Wizz - whilst never to date operating from MAN - has also used the mechanism of seeking alternative offers to keep terms competitive. I expect that Blue Air routinely does likewise. And fair enough; that is how the business works. Similarly, those airlines which have selected MAN as their primary operating base will also periodically sound out alternatives to keep their terms as competitive as possible. MAN has in the past lost CSA, Air India and Bangladesh Biman (first time around) to this process, and Adria had expressed intent to do likewise. Primera Air also selected BHX as their main base ahead of MAN, and Monarch Airlines reduced their MAN presence in favour of expanding at BHX instead. MAN doesn't automatically win every battle. And BTW, I doubt that LPL would have enjoyed privileged access to Adria's accounts at the time of that bid. They were business worth pursuing when they were pitched. This competitive bidding process is healthy for airlines and their customers, and from the perspective of airports it works both ways. LPL (and others) can (and do) gain at MAN's expense as well as the other way around.

You may recall that afew years ago Ryanair abruptly pulled all its schedules ex-MAN with the exception of the Dublin service in a dispute over "rip-off fees". So MAN certainly wasn't using any "anti-competitive pricing" powers to gain advantage over the thriving LPL base at that point. And Ryanair's return to MAN post-dispute came with higher charges attached ... I don't know what the LPL fees were but it does seem that Ryanair was paying more to use MAN. So again, the evidence suggests that MAN has not used its size to undercut LPL on price in the past. On the contrary, it has leveraged its attractive business proposition to charge more than smaller airports do.

The situation vis-a-vis LBA is different again. The reason that Jet2 stopped growing much there was that they had effectively bulked out the airport in terms of overnight aircraft parking capacity. Pre-COVID, LBA was operating pretty much to the capacity its fixed infrastructure could tolerate, so no adverse effects from neighbouring airports inhibiting the action there. We don't know how the market will respond post-C19, but beyond it's 2019 throughput, LBA growth is primarily dependent on increasing terminal and aircraft parking capacity on site. Certainly, MAN was not eating their lunch back then. Note too that LBA actually DID attract a Ryanair base AFTER that carrier was an established based operator at MAN.

Your assertion of MAN operating on a monopolistic basis doesn't stand up to scrutiny. Pre-COVID, LPL was scoring around five million pax per annum which is pretty healthy going. LBA, as mentioned, was restrained by the limitations of their infrastructure but operating broadly to capacity. DSA was doing fine, and has offset the recent loss of it's FlyBe operation with a two-ship Wizz base (alongside their existing TUI business). That would put them on course for record passenger throughput once C-19 is behind us. EMA is most notably a cargo hub, though it does have a healthy sideline in passenger airline business which appeared to be ticking along nicely pre-virus. Meanwhile, as mentioned earlier, BHX can point to its fair share of wins in the perennial battle for business with MAN.

So there is no evidence of any genuine issue with the existing system of airports competitively pitching for airline business. All local airports can boast their share of successes. MAN has never run away with 100% of the pie, and I don't anticipate anything close to that transpiring, notwithstanding that first-level airports tend to be the focus of consolidation in an immediate post-recession market environment. We may see an element of that playing out, but it does not constitute anti-competitive behaviour by the beneficiary airport. MAN is not state-backed ... it needs to make money, and all it's business pitches must allow for a worthwhile return to the bottom line, no matter how bids are structured. They've got an expensive new terminal extension to pay off.

The recent round of alarmism from some LPL advocates is without merit. The current system of airports competing for business from a range of carriers is working just fine. And the ultimate winners from this process are the fare-paying passengers.

It won’t go down well with my friends further down the Mersey, but I would suggest that the renaissance that came when EZY and RYR took off there was actually because of Manchester. It’s well known that Manchester management at the time were pretty dismissive of the low cost carriers, preferring to court full service airlines. If they hadn’t done that, and had encouraged EZY and RYR as they do now, then it’s not unrealistic to suggest that both airlines would have come to MAN and not served Liverpool, which would have made things extremely difficult or even fatal for them.

True that Manchester management were anti LCC and that EZY went to LPL instead however I think that FR were instructed by the Irish Government to use LPL to protect Aer Lingus at that time. FR eventually went back but have fell out with MAN a few times and and have moved flights at the whim of MOL. Now MAN has bags of space with the opening of T2 extension and are hoping to tempt W6 from LPL as well. Could be interesting in the next few months.

Sounds like an interesting conversation.... :ok:

Rod Hill who was the CEO at LPL at the time was the man who got Easyjet to look at a north of England base. They started with Amsterdam and Nice.

Yes that was what happened at the time Aer Lingus were told to stop flying to Liverpool by the Irish Government in favour of Ryanair, and vice versa at Manchester.

...& yes way back in the day a similar arrangement existed at STN too on the direction of the Irish Government re EIN & RYR.

Hey MAG! Opportunity knocks ... if you're quick, agile and up for a challenge!!!

Dig out that plan you shelved around five years ago. Blow off the dust. The one which would have resulted in the T3 pier being extended to the east, allowing for afew more gates to accommodate based Ryanair B738's. Back then, you discovered that a number of utility and fibre cable trunk routes were routed under Old Ringway Road, and these would have to be rerouted at your expense to allow the build to proceed. So you dropped the extension plan on cost grounds - and, lo and behold - you subsequently had to turn away Ryanair's request to base an additional five B738's at MAN because T3 was bulked out. Quelle surprise! And that was certainly detrimental to the economy of this region. Was it three extra EasyJet's you couldn't fit in T1 as well? Tragic.

Well, now Santa is coming to town and he is bearing gifts. £4Bn available for projects in the North which offer "clear benefit to the region" and which can be delivered during the lifetime of this government (three years?).

You can borrow this letter template which I've prepared for you if you like. Save time!

Dear Rishi (me old cock-sparrow),

We know you've chucked us under the bus so far during this covid pandemic-thingie. But maybe you could glance in our direction now? Time you showed us some love, pal!!! [**Remember to sound very Northern so those Westminster civil servant types take note of your inherent regionalness and oikish charm**].

We've got this ace cool plan to extend out our T3 Pier to the east so we can accommodate additional European air services for the economic benefit of our region (brill for post-Brexit trading links 'n' all). Unfortunately, there is a bunch of utility cables under the site we need which meant we couldn't make the numbers work for our shareholders, even though that expansion would have greatly benefitted the region's economy. We subsequently had to refuse an additional five based Ryanair B738's due to lack of space in T3. And EasyJet Airbi in T1 'cos we'd not expanded there either. So hows about we sit down tomorrow and talk about paying for our T3 pier extension with dough from your £4Bn 'levelling-up' war-chest? We can deliver within three years - honest! - and we'll certainly be needing the extra stands by then with C-19 well in the rear-view mirror. And here's the best bit: Ryanair don't even want fancy gates with business lounges and artworks. They want low cost functional ones which do the job effectively. So they're actually quite cheap to build if we could just shift those darned utility cables out of the way? Howzabout it, Guv? Maybe chuck in an extra twenty quid for some harp stickers (the new ones with enhanced kn*ckers) and a bit of blue and gold paint?

Oh, and if you could spare afew bob to help us complete T2 Pier 2 which we've had to freeze that would be really great as well. The planes will all be back in three years and we can't afford to build anything for them right now. No dosh coming in and all that.

Cheers, Pal!

Lots of Luv and Sloppy Kisses,

Cheerful Charlie, ('New Broom') Can-Do Kaz and all your mates the MAG Massif.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

You know it makes sense. How could Rishi refuse?

And let's be honest here. We all know that there were long term hopes to replace T1 & 3 with a new T2-style replacement eventually. But that idea is an absolute dead duck now following what Covid has wrought. So what we really need to do (in a hurry) is knock T1 and T3 together into a single terminal. Then knock down T1 car park and extend the existing complex to the North with a new mega-security area for fast and efficient processing of passengers. Lots of baggage drops, QR-code readers and a big arrivals area with zillions of egates. Then we buy a bunch of orange, blue / gold, pink / purple paint and ... wizzo ... we got ourselves an awesome quick-turnaround cheap and cheerful no-frills mega terminal for three well known carriers to bulk out? What's not to love?

Then we concentrate all the long-haul, business travel and upmarket leisure stuff in our new T2 interchange with a super-efficient transfers lounge and great facilities. Compact parking area measured up for Dashes and ATR's. Domestic arrivals channel. Dedicated areas for Oneworld, Star Alliance and SkyTeam. Jet2 Zone. TUI Zone. Virgin Zone (airline variety). Every other misfit zone. Private lounges. Top-end retail. The works! A fantastic amenity for the North. Demonstrable benefit to the economy. Deliverable within the lifetime of this government. If you cast aside MAN's favourite word ... "NO!!!"

Text Rishi now. Ask for some dosh. Blow the dust off the T3 pier extension plan. Buy some shovels. Get to work. You've got three years to get it done. Tick tock ...

Oh ... and if you do a Zoom meeting with Whitehall, be sure to bury that Manchester cargo marketing guy under the floorboards. He will blow the whole game again. Suggest they spend the dosh at Stansted. You've seen his track record. Is he dead already?

P.S. Dear Rishi. Please will you buy us a new Hi-Lo. From that fund. Huge benefit for the North. We promise not to ship it out to Stansted later. Honest! Fingers crossed and hope to die! Love, Chaz and Kaz. :-)

Manchester cargo guy?? Well he doesn't appear to know where the 'reply' button on emails is - assuming that he receives them.

Sorry.....

If major utilities need to be moved then there is no chance of delivery in 5 years, let alone 3.

OK, I confess. That bit was a joke. There isn't one. There's just a guy based at EMA who takes MAN's calls and switch-sells them to EMA / STN! :-)

Give me some shovels. I'll get it sorted for 'em.

I think the original plans suggested three so mr Mr Ozzy is infact correct.

Always liked Paranoid btw........

MAG may have thought 3 years, but had they discussed it with the utility companies, whose workplans have to be agreed with their regulators...?

Yep. But they can blame Gubmint bureaucracy for that inevitable delay. And so keep the dosh. Or risk hacking off the voters at a crucial moment!

Even allowing for what has happened to the industry this year - I can't see MAG spending the money to extend T1, when the plan was for it to be mothballed pretty soon after the entirety of the T2 works were complete. The costs of demolishing that car park and rebuilding a new passenger handling structure in its place would be significant, and I can't see that it make financial sense when they've already accepted that T1 needs to go, and that it's likely that terminal capacity is going to be much less of an issue for the foreseeable.

On the topic of new stands for Ryanair and easyJet based growth, is it not simpler to concrete some off terminal apron and bus? It's far from ideal but it's also pretty common to do so. I mean if you really want more loco, that would seem a decent halfway house. Or is the cost of the bussing being passed onto the airlines who won't pay for an airbridge a deal breaker?

It's a fair question Skip, and I'm sure someone can give you a more informed answer than me. However, with the boundary limits, I'm just not sure how much ground is left to concrete over for additional apron parking. I've a feeling there may still be space to the NW of Pier 1 of T2 and beyond the existing remote stands newly completed. With the inevitable staggering of the first wave departure slots, I think before covid, a/c for the later departures of that wave were often brought onto stand after the early flights had gone, rather than busing. But that requires a slick towing operation.

Can't really comment on relative costs and who stands them.

This would be a service diversion, paid for by MAG so not requiring any agreement from the regulator. It would take a while to plan in just because of the nature of the cables to be moved.

Your concerns are valid. But if we acknowledge that T1 in particular has had very little spent on it in recent times in expectation that it would be demolished in the not too distant future, then doing nothing cannot remain a viable option for much longer. The envelope has been pushed pretty much to the limit. So if a new-build terminal is off the menu (almost a certainty given the implied costs of that) then a significant refresh / refurb of T1/T3 actually IS itself the cheap option. If that complex has to serve for another 20 years (for example) - a highly likely scenario - and since it has already been neglected for a decade now, some money will have to be spent on it. It can't soldier on for much longer without some well overdue TLC. I'd heard (and stand to be corrected on this) that the original T1 car park will need to come down anyway (structure life-expired?). So that space could be used to extend capability for processing formalities re arriving and departing pax. This also brings significant operational cost savings, as ideally T3 would cease to be serviced as a check-in / arrivals point in its own right. Just one set of facilities needed to service the whole complex as one integrated larger terminal. The extension need not be an expensive showpiece structure. 'Functional' and 'low budget' would tick all the boxes. Ryanair encourages thrift in such developments too. No-frills carriers love that whole 'bus station' vibe.

On the matter of how quickly terminal capacity will be needed, I'd suggest that the return of business will be very uneven across different market sectors. Short-haul no-frills carriers will go for a 'landgrab' strategy, securing valuable peak-time slots where they can and grandfathering them to stake their future. This puts pressure on less flexible legacy competitors as well. They can do this with some confidence too, as previous recessions have shown that people DO still take vacations after a downturn - but they often choose to trade down to a lower budget option for a couple of years. Hence cheapie flights to Spain and Turkey come back much stronger than upmarket offerings to Florida and the Caribbean. Business travel trades down too to a far greater extent than people realise. MAN needs to plan around the likelihood that an increased proportion of its customers will be using no-frills metal in the years to come. And that means that T1/T3 - the likely home of no-frills at MAN - must be tailored to cope with that market shift. Higher footfall, shorter dwell-times airside. It doesn't need to be an architectural showpiece. Cheap and reliable is the requirement. Boxy and functional is fine.

Unfortunately, as MANFOD alludes to, the only land which could reasonably be converted for additional aircraft parking is located on the west side of the airport - much too distant to be a viable option for quick service no-frills turnarounds serviced from T1/T3. And the only land available close to the existing T3 footprint is that same area which has all those utilities routed beneath it. The problem there was never the cost of extending the pier structure itself - it was the cost of rerouting those utilities. And that challenge applies equally whether one were to build a structure or just remote hard stands over that space. So the real choice is stark: pay to reroute the utilities and expand capacity, or accept the existing limitations for the long term. I can't visualise any suitable spare land of sufficient size for aircraft parking adjacent to the T1 footprint.