It doesn't have to be like that. Stansted is a chaos on the Ryanair side at check-in etc, but when Jet2 came in they put effort into notably improved procedures throughout. Which is how they have managed to expand in a market everyone said was dying.

I totally agree regarding Jet2 at STN. They have a very impressive presence of their own staff (particularly at check-in)

Unfortunately TUI rely on the lottery of Swissport at LTN! My Daughter recently flew ex LTN to RHO with TUI and mentioned that check-in was a particularly painful experience (mainly due to very limited staff)

Swissport at LTN are indeed painful to deal with - aggressive and not paticularly competent. Of course, if you squeeze wages and impose very tough performance requirements it's not exactly surprising the staff are miserable and hostile.

Can I ask that the comment above is based on personal experience or hearsay? Please verify. My concern is that not only has this forum been hijacked by anti airport protestors but equally we might have individuals making slanderous statements and let’s not forget the political views that has become endemic within! For the record if London Luton Airport was so awful then why (prior to the pandemic) is it’s growth in passenger levels each year enviable?

Luton is an awful airport from a passenger point of view.... but it attracts airlines offering very cheap airfares. We may moan endlessly about how terrible the experience is when we actually fly.... but when we're sitting at home on the comfy sofa with our credit cards, we become cheapskates and decide we don't want to spend a penny more than we absolutely have to and somehow fool ourselves into thinking Luton will be better next time

Disclaimer - I've flown in or out of Luton over 150 times. You'd think by now I would have learned that Luton isn't going to magically become good next time...

I am not an airport protestor, but I am certainly against a local council hoodwinked into creating a MASSIVE debt gambling on advice from allegedly experienced consultants. The airport is owned by everyone living in the Borough, but I fear a fire sale. If the DART wasn't barking mad, T2 is outrageous!

Lee Baker Street. So who is making slanderous statements? I don’t think anyone here is anti-airport but there are a few of us here that can smell a rat and can see what is going on.

Recently the Council spent £3.2m on buying the Eden Farm factory next to the Holiday Inn, as the lorry loading bay area is required for a viaduct for the Terminal 2 access road. This despite the planning application coming from the airport owner London Luton Airport Ltd but then LLAL has no money and no income. Not content with spending £3.2m, the sitting long term tenant moves out at the same time (or were they forced), leaving the council with an annual bill of £513,000 in rental costs as they don’t own the freehold plus security costs of £140,000 for a road that might not be built for years or never built if the DCO is not approved. This from a Council that was bailed out by the government to the tune of £38m, as they claimed they didn’t have enough money to pay for social services.

The T2 access road has a history of its own, which was disguised in a planning application for Century Park. The business case was rubbished by the Council's Finance Scrutiny Group in 2019 and the Scrutiny Group's damning verdict was confirmed by the Executive Committee when they considered it a month later.

On September 23rd this year the Finance Scrutiny meeting went into secret session and this time approved the £100m spending, which will be funded by the Council. They offered no explanation why they thought the Council should be spending millions of pounds of taxpayers' money on a project their own Executive Committee had agreed was not supported by a financially sound business case but then we all know this has nothing to do with Century Park and everything to do with T2.

https://i.imgur.com/6oL44Yr.jpg

Next month the airport owner decides on a planning application by the airport operator to expand capacity to 19m without making any alterations to the terminal to alleviate overcrowding that is set to get worse. Unlike most airport related meetings it will be held in public with the charade being held over 2 nights. The Council advised the airport operator to cancel and then resubmit the planning application, which looks identical, thus removing 450 objections at a stroke. So why was this? No one knows, as that meeting was held in secret. I will tell you the result. The application will be approved with every Labour Councillor on the planning committee voting in favour while the Lib Dems will vote against. How Stansted, Gatwick and other airports would love to approve their own expansion plans with no Council interference or objections, as this is part of LLAL’s master plan. What we don't know is whether LLAL are paying the airport operator to put in the application.

While all this is going own on I am seeing evidence that the Council is not paying all of its bills despite court judgements so will they go bust first?

LBS - I've spent 35 years working at LTN and I've always been pro-airport. If you took the time to digest and understand what has been highlighted in this thread recently it should be fairly apparent that there are serious issues with how the airport is currently being managed and financed via LBC/LLAL. All local residents should be aware of this but instead LBC chooses to mislead and hide their actions. Mentioning any of this is not political or slanderous and were it not for forums like this, virtually no one would be aware of whats really going on with LBC/LLAL

boeing_eng comments are spot on. Sir Philip Green would be proud of LBC/LLAL ducking and diving and with their hiding of the truth. Then we have the Dart where to this day they have still failed to make public the H.M. Treasury Five-Case Business Model for Public Authority Funded Protects, despite two Freedom of Information requests and the Information Commissioners Office getting involved. The reason given was that it was commercially sensitive information. So why would it still be commercially sensitive apart from the fact that it could not be financially justified, as the airport reached its then legal maximum passenger count some 3 years before was Dart is due to open at a cost of £283m.

Another LLAL BS press release.

LLAL has no staff so how can they have an apprentice? She actually works for the Council on LLAL projects so is a Council apprentice but that doesn't look as good as being an LLAL apprentice. The "eye opening" comment is probably true if she has been delving into the LLAL business model.

Wizzair's website now shows 80 routes from LTN; those marked "new" are Plovdiv, Naples, Rome FIU, Marrakesh, Rzeszow, Ljubljana and Antalya.

For those with Facebook, this emerged this evening....
Looks like posts from Facebook are banned then. You'll need to look up Luton Liberal Democrats on Facebook and read the press release for today.

I covered the above subject a few times here in the past regarding airport directors voting on airport matters at Council meetings. The Monitoring Officer who was tasked with the investigation did nothing, even refusing to answer the complainants letters asking for updates, which resulted in a complaint to the Ombudsman that was upheld. For her sins and maybe to silence her from embarrassing questions she was made redundant and paid off only to be replaced by a new Monitoring Officer who won't reopen the case.

The Council Solicitor, who some think is part of a conspiracy, then stood up at a Standards Committee meeting and claimed there was insufficient evidence to hold an investigation yet no one is disputing a debate and vote on a motion contrary to the Code of Conduct took place. The individual airport directors votes are even recorded in the minutes. There was a very clear conflict between their responsibilities as elected Councillors and their responsibilities as directors of the airport company.

Regarding the initial letter of complaint to the Council leader, according to a Council report it was passed on to an airport supporting and pro Council troll on social media within 3 hours of it arriving in the Council mailbox on a Saturday afternoon where the letter including Council received markers was fully published together with personal insults about that local community. That in itself was a data breach, which is a criminal act and resulted in an investigation by the ICO. The report stated the only people who were forwarded the email before publication was the leader of the opposition, the CEO of the Council and the Deputy CEO who all denied leaking the letter.

LGS6753

Is that 81 now with VCE base announced today ?

pabely -

Yes, that will be 81. The VCE service is 4x weekly and starts in early March 22.

The reason I asked was the Summer slots these new routes will be using must be to less frequently on trunk routes vs 2019, the LGW affect?
My 2+2 thought would be if WZZ gain more LGW slots then LTN will not necessarily suffer but gain more completion on sunshine routes which will keep customers prices in check. I think RYR already know this which might explain why they made a massive S22 slots request application to firefight them.

August passenger figures 772,808 down 53,000 on last year. Luton's third busiest route is now Belfast

Luton attracts the financially less well off so could be impacted harder next year by a financial squeeze on discretionary spending. Might come down to holidays or heat as eventually something has to be sacrificed. Also we are constantly told the EU nationals have gone home although 5.5m applied and received a right to remain. Luton will be hoping that they all stayed as their expansion plans will be in taters without that customer base.

EasyJet currently showing 68 destinations from Luton compared with Wizz's 81. (Some may be seasonal)

Hurrah, some news about routes etc. Over the last few days I thought I was reading the letters page of the Luton News!

The airport owners are worthy of many column inches so I am not going to knock the information that comes up here.

While passengers are lower due to restrictions the tally in each direction is almost identical so I doubt many have bought one way tickets to flee the UK as claimed in the media.

I saw 3 TUI 737’s outside their hangar the other day. It seems it is now the only time TUI visits Luton these days. Are there any plans for a TUI aircraft to be based at Luton next year?