Good interview shown with AGS at Routes Europe recently. Mentioned that SOU was the most exciting project of all 3 of their airports, has huge potential and are looking to increase pax numbers with much more leisure. EasyJet was discussed as expanding at the airport and general growth would ‘snowball’ over the next few years, promising!

It's not "only 147 passengers" though, is it? It's almost 300 per day if you count the return legs too.
9000 a month, 108000 a year. That's a lot less people paying for car parking, food & drinks, magazines, lounges etc. That'll hit the airport's bottom line.
There's also the loss of landing fees, fuel uplift and passenger fees. Losing an established operator on a trunk route is never a good thing.
Airports exist as an economic driver for the wider region, and the Southampton region has had business and commuter friendly flights to Scotland's largest and most industrial city for decades. After the 10th of May it won't have anymore, and that's an economic loss to the area.

Er, it’s not though is it as from the start of May easyjet go daily so capacity is not lost!

It is a loss compared to LM remaining on the route and coexisting with easyJet which they had been until now.
And regardless of the passenger numbers, going from 3/4 flights per day to one is a net negative for the region's travellers, particularly business travellers, many of whom will use Heathrow instead.

Capacity may not be lost, but for those like me who need to be able to travel there and back in the day, it will entail an earlier start and an hour or more on the M3 to Heathrow.

Sorry to hear that.

If nothing else it will make the departure board look even more sparse and will remove a whole category of passenger that seeks flight times that easyjet will not be offering, while attracting a new category of passenger that is happy with the easyjet offering, if the price is right, despite the inflexibility of the random flight programme.

There is also the question of incentives, if any, that SOU had to offer easyjet vs the charges LM were paying as the established airline. Did SOU management approach LM with a better deal to try and keep them or has LM got itself into a huff at being forced off the route so jeopardising its other routes? The danger for the airport is that if easyjet pull the route it is unlikely LM will return.

Can you post a link to this please, it sounds like it would be interesting to see in its entirety.

What you describe on your first paragraph is pretty well what is happening at all UK airports excepting LHR and to a lesser extent LGW. Leisure is now dominant even at major regionals such as EDI, MAN, BHX and BRS, with business travel in steady decline, Covid and corporate "green" policies being largely to blame.

Always was..

Its on YouTube

Here you go, SOU talk starts just after the halfway point, it begins talking about GLA.

easyJet
 

So which destinations Should easyJet be adding?

High frequency regional is in decline the world over.

Emerald will be the next to make cut backs.

Anyone have any info or updates on the refinancing of the 757m depts AGS currently have, I believe the payment maturity date is 18th June 24?

If this happens where does it leave SOU ?
I'm afraid that the runway extension has been a damp squib, we are back to relying on one airline ,that is EASY,just like FLYbe pre covid.
There is no airlines coming through with new route,bar a 2x Caen service,the domestic routes are contracting at a alarming rate,we can't complete with BOH rapid expansion,how can the airport reach break even figures of 1.2 mill?
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There is a fixation with a certain passenger volume to break even. If the airport has 750,000 pax from eight airlines then it might be profitable depending on what those airlines are paying and the average spend of those passengers on car parking and other income streams. If the airport has 2 million pax from one airline, it might still be loss-making if the airline has a deal to pay very little and the average spend per passenger is low.

Exactly, and you can be sure easyJet won’t be paying fully published fees.

Another supposed ‘strength’ of SOU is actually its biggest weakness. SOU is double the size of the BOH catchment area, but that population includes a big swathe along the M3 corridor which includes greater south west London. Residents with the equidistant geography between SOU or LHR would naturally flow to LHR. It would be a very costly exercise to try to stop that flow which is facilitated by significant transport and infrastructure capacity. Therefore the ‘true’ catchment of SOU needs to be better understood by its owners. A similar issue can be seen when analysing GLA v EDI or CWL v BRS. CWL and GLA could be seen as ‘in decline’ versus their closest counterparts.

SOU has two options: focus on low cost airlines to try and disrupt that natural flow in its catchment area, or, to downsize so it focuses on higher frequency, regional flying which potentially could be more cash lucrative for existing infrastructure without the need to invest in larger facilities. The latter is possibly not sustainable however, so the answer is obvious.

Excellent post :ok:

They aren't exclusive. The mistake will be to concentrate on one thing. Spread the risk and maximise income from as many sources as possible

Gosh! This is an epiphany moment. Quite right, accentuate the positive.

Don't agree either. I live in West Berks, about 40 miles from LHR and SOU. Back a few years ago when I was flying for work trips I always used SOU to go to places like JER, GCI, BHD and GLA. LHR (or LGW) for longer-haul stuff.

My SOU trips were nearly always daytrips aswell. SOU made that easy as, for example, at LHR it's just not possible to be driving out of the airport 10 minutes after getting off the aeroplane. I lament that many of these daytrip options now seem to be increasingly unavailable.

Some facts to clear up some confusion:

- A direct quote from the airport was that it cannot be profitable with the likes of Loganair serving regional routes. So it needs the scale of a low cost operator as a regional the size of Flybe is unlikely ever to happen again. So let’s all stop caring about bloody Loganair! They have been making hay whilst the sun-shined but are of no use to a profitable airport that want thousands using their shops, parking and facilities rather than a hundred or so. Please let this sink in as it’s direct from the airport and puts any debate of a low cost operator vs a regional to bed. It’s a low cost operator or nothing in today’s world.

- Frequency and the ability to do a day trip is a nice to have but I bet you can fly Easy to Glasgow, get a hotel for the night and a meal and still have paid less than a day return on Logan. Less frequency is only going to be an issue for a very small amount of people.

- It doesn’t have to be one or the other. Emerald as things stand are doing very well and are seeing growth. Having the Aer Lingus code share and brand gives them an edge. It’s the same reason why Easy could probably do AMS and KLM still stay with its world connections.

- The current rumours are that more routes will be added but from aircraft based elsewhere. Other bases have grown this way. You can still have a crew base in SOU but no aircraft based.

-Easy are now starting to rapidly add new aircraft so will now have capacity for growth.

If we're dealing in facts as you suggest, there's nowhere on the easyJet network where they do that. Any crew base has aircraft based there. It's ludicrous to suggest they might have Southampton-based crew but no Southampton-based aircraft.

They do nightstop away from base in a few locations - ABZ, INV, BHD and JER spring to mind for Gatwick - but that's about as far as it goes.

Hopefully easyJet will add another couple of routes for this winter season.

This from the man who got his arse handed to him on the Loganair thread for an angry rant about he can't comprehend Loganair and they're doomed to failure for abandoning Southampton for "barren Scottish islands". What you're continually ignoring after having it spelled out to you, is SOU can have one of two things on a route.
1) High frequency, higher cost on a turboprop or an ERJ
2) High volume, low cost, poor frequency on an A320 series

With a SOU sized market, there's no room for both. No point raging at Loganair when they do exactly what they were expected to do to survive.

SOU 2023 Full Year Route Breakdown
 

A break from the usual arguments/repeated posts/personal attacks:

Summary of passenger numbers & changes on all regular scheduled and charter routes for 2023, including % change on 2022.

UK

Aberdeen - 6,115 (+95%)
Alderney - 17,214 (+1%)
Belfast City - 79,810 (+32%)
Belfast International - 5,332 (New)
Edinburgh - 89,058 (+9%)
Glasgow - 87,044 (+16%)
Guernsey - 97,466 (+1%)
Jersey - 99,895 (+0%)
Manchester - 5,515 (-49%)
Newcastle - 46,908 (+20%)
Stornoway - 5,201 (New)

Total UK - 493,119

Republic of Ireland

Dublin - 76,300 (+150%)

France

Bergerac - 3,452 (-53%)
Chambery - 4,445 (+47%)
Limoges - 981 (-65%)
Paris Orly - 9,043 (New)

Total France - 17,921

Netherlands

Amsterdam - 86,015 (+63%)

Switzerland

Geneva - 17,934 (+92%)

Austria

Salzburg - 1,895 (+46%)

Spain

Alicante - 1,112 (-73%)
Palma - 16,239 (+27%)
Malaga - 3,868 (-48%)

Total Spain - 21,219

Portugal

Faro - 3,766 (-4%)


Total Overall - 754,931 (+20%, includes charters/one off flights/diversions etc)

What is the source of your data? The CAA table 12.3 gives slightly different numbers (not that it matters)

https://cimg8.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune....c7cc7eeb57.png

The same tables in a different document has different numbers! There is presumably a counting detail difference between them. https://www.caa.co.uk/Documents/Down...accf0d90/16429

So how would that work without some non based flight crew day stopping at SOU while a SOU crew took over?

Some great figures there. Circa 90k on Glasgow and Edinburgh is food for thought for the likes of Easy. Let’s not forget that those numbers are largely from people paying Loganair prices so imagine what the numbers could be if both routes were served by Easy? Belfast, Dublin and Amsterdam also very strong.

Interview with Christopher Tibbett, Aviation Director, AGS Airports, at Routes Europe 2024.

Thanks Adfly, good data as ever. Apart from numbers for the Channel Islands, EDI/LM with 90k seems to have held up well (but with limited growth) and there has no doubt been some leakage to Ryanair at BOH with 48k on the same route. With this in mind, I would stake money on easyJet jumping on this from October with a daily 320 that would deliver well over 100k seats. LM coming off GLA means easyjet may see this as a time to move in for the kill. Really hard on LM when they delivered a decent recovery for the airport after Covid/BE but I guess this is how the big, bad, ruthless LCC operate!

It's the nature of the business. Flybe and Air Southwest for example.

Was said tongue in cheek

apologies its hard to tell on this thread TBH

I see EasyJet has just flown a new A320 neo on the Southampton to Glasgow route. Is this a first for the airport?

https://cimg1.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune....9356106944.png