MAN-SOU was always popular with passengers joining their cruise in Southampton as are all the domestic flights from the regions.

This year just like last year we have had to increase the amount of coaching opportunities from the northwest for cruise passengers due to the lack of direct flights to Southampton.

I live in Manchester but work for a firm based on the south coast, so I use the Eastern service usually around 2 or 3 times a month to get there and back for office visits. Despite the very limited timetable and the quite frequent hefty delays, it is still the best way to get from North West England to the south coast. I actually really enjoy flying with Eastern Airways as well, so I was really looking forward to the flights being increased to twice daily from next month. I'd made a number of bookings throughout the summer, and would likely have made a bunch more, so I was pretty gutted when I got the email saying my flights had been cancelled following them suspending the route. The idea of having to go back to the train again is painful.

The timing of this is quite interesting. Although the flights were never full, they did seem to be getting a lot busier. When I first started using the route regularly about 7 or 8 months ago you'd be lucky to get 20 people on board. There must have been around 50 on a return flight 3 weeks ago, and then I took what will probably be my last flight on this route until September this evening, with at least 40 people on board. As has already been mentioned this has always been a popular route for people connecting with cruises, for which we are entering the busiest part of the year. I know Eastern are currently in the process of kicking off new routes to Paris Orly from a handful of UK regional airports... the cynic in me suspected that it may be a case of them focusing on those new routes and diverting resources accordingly.

I'm not hopeful, but I would love it if another operator picked up this route. Flybe did have dates available for the route on their website before the company went bust again, so hopefully Loganair or Blue Islands will see the market for this.

"There is money to be made by the right operator, offering reliability and a fair but profitable tariff. That doesn't mean the sort of fare one could fly Manchester to New York for!"

But people who charge these "exorbitant" fares still go bust regularly on internal UK routes - in fact they've been going bust for over 70 years. It's the overheads and the relatively small number of passengers that seem to kill them.

I agree with your general point, though MAN-SOU didn't have a "relatively small" number of passengers pre-covid. It supported upto six return Q400 flights per day. It is a much-needed route. I'm acutely aware that FlyBe failed, but I'm confident that the MAN-SOU route wasn't the reason for that. The issues faced by this company have been extensively discussed elsewhere - too thinly spread, expensive leases, uneconomic bases, and more.

Where I do think there is a problem is the very high payouts for short domestic sectors specified by delay compensation rules. I suspect that these payouts were a major factor in killing off Stobart's MAN-SEN route. The demanding schedule implemented on those ATR72's meant that delays often built up through the day, leaving many passengers eligible to claim very generous compensation. I would favour a system under which delay compensation for domestic flights is capped at the price paid for the ticket (similar to rail).

Isn't domestic business travel still well behind pre-COVID levels though? The MAN-SOU x 6 daily was an old school business route, many of the regulars back then are now TWATs only on a good week and can WFH for the most part. Many client meetings are still Teams or Zoom.

Yes, but that reduced demand is why we are advocating for a service less frequent than six per day - but more frequent than none at all! A RELIABLE twice daily service with sensible pricing from the perspective of both the operator and customers would be a welcome initial solution. Also, the nature of the overland journey between Manchester and Southampton means that the market is not limited to business travellers alone.

Being reported elsewhere that the Air Canada A333 on this summer's MAN-YYZ will be flown by an Omni B767 on selected dates....

Terrific, that won't cause a problem... at all. 🤔

The old BA hangar is finally back on the market. Any takers? It will need a damn good clean.

Managed decline of this route. I would rather give my money to Transat anyway who do not arse about with a tiny little schedule!

Hovis
One of mine 🙂 Longtime ago.

Cheers
Mr Mac

I’m currently in the midst of a six hour expensive rail journey from Southampton to Manchester with rail replacement bus that stops a fair distance from Oxford station, in the pouring rain.
Eastern couldn’t have picked a worse time to dump the route. Anyone thinking of going by rail- forget it for the next 2 months. Missed opportunity by Eastern!

With the line closed for several more weeks between Didcot and Oxford, travel from the coast will be a mare for sure . And the bus connections are only hourly I believe - Complete disaster . You could use the local service N2/32 however takes almost a hour to cover the 8 miles through Milton Park and Abingdon .

I presume the bus service is stoping on Park End Lane as opposed to the station car park ?

I suppose you are left with the 2 hour hike to Waterloo cross town and near 3 hour on Avanti ( if that’s not cancelled as well)

Was going to suggest Emerald via Belfast or Dublin but even that doesn’t work 😡

Does anything work in these isles at all these days ?

One thinks EasyJet will launch this MAN-SOU route at some point. 5x weekly A319. It still baffles me why they don’t fly LGW-MAN; no connection onto BA ever since they dropped the Gatwick route!

Runway slots are a major problem at LGW. Not so much at SOU.

Memo to MAG Route Development ... Are you reading this thread? When did you last phone Messrs Hinckles and Lundgren for a chat? Doesn't look like Eastern are interested!

BA LGW is point to point aside from GLA which survives to rotate short haul maintenance through the hangar. BA aside, what does MAN-LGW serve if not connections most of which can be flown out of MAN? Is Brighton-MAN a draw? Crawley? West Sussex? If it's London, train makes way more sense.

Surprised Loganair haven't looked at Manchester - Southampton.

BA Caribbean flights. The hideous trek down to Gatwick on M6, M40, M25, M23 et cetera puts many off. Trains can be very unreliable especially shown in these last 9-10 months of strikes. I think a Gatwick route would be 90% connections anyway. Probably if BA get some of those Max aircraft they may give it another go.

Do the MAX's come with additional slots?!? :ok:

Classic problem always was the revenue on flights with so many connections used to get allocated to long haul and the short haul business saw a loss as a result. It'd be no more than one LGW-MAN-LGW per day to feed as much of the long haul arrivals as possible BUT crucially the B777 fleet turns and starts departing from 10am when there's still 2-3 inbounds due or just landed. It's currently not even possible to feed the existing smallish long haul program with one daily flight. It's not gonna happen, the reborn operation died a quick death recently.