It's horses for courses, despite all the disadvantages, it can be very convenient to take a flight, and cheaper too in many cases. As for duty-free shops on the airport, if not impressed or not interested, just walk past.

A good tip is to check-in online. Another is to travel with hand baggage only if possible, that saves a lot of time.

Also, pre-flight time on the kind of smaller airports that BE mostly operates out of doesn't have to be that long. In fact this is a good selling point for small airports, they should make more of it.

In fact for those of us whose local airport is Heathrow, passing through a small airport is a novelty, and makes a very pleasant change.




To an extent, yes, but it's a double-edged sword: it was damned expensive! Fares were fixed by IATA, and the same on all carriers. First class was twice the price of economy, which was only of a fully flexible type. Hence the need to "reconfirm" travel, so that carriers could have a rough idea of the numbers turning up for a flight.

This cosy arrangement ended when non-IATA carriers started charter flights and the legacies introduced ABC ("Advance Booking Charter") and APEX ("Advance Purchass Excursion") fares to compete.

Also, most longhaul flights were multi-stop, and frequencies were shockingly low.


Am also an old(ish) git, but not a grumpy one.

Further changes being made to the summer schedule.

NQY-BHX now available daily until October 24.
NQY-STN now 4 weekly instead of the three that was initially loaded, now tues, thurs, sat and sun

Does anyone know if anymore new routes are forecast for SOU?

Also, does anyone know how the JER/SOU/LBA/ABZ shuttle is performing?

It's a bit up and down :)

Ah yes, the good old days when we paid £400 for day returns to London, £600 for Paris and Amsterdam and when we had next to no choice on departure days if you wanted to go somewhere for a holiday. You went away for a week on one allotted day per week. Yeah, them were the day. Must have been nice if you could have afforded that but today's system provide safe travel for all and relatively stable companies to be employed by but also to do business with.

cwl/dus
 

flybe starting cwl to dus in april25th to october the 3rd.
i flt per week on a saturday using a e175.

Once weekly CWL-DUS? What is the point? Am I missing something here?

A Saturday-only DUS-EXT service has operated during the last two summer seasons. Mainly incoming German holidaymakers.

ref. the Flybe shuttle, i just flew the competition on LBA-SOU, and was the only passenger on the flight..they didn't even operate the preceeding ABZ-LBA leg..not good for Eastern

The CWL-DUS Summer Saturday service looks to be replacing one operated by Eurowings that they recently pulled for this year.

Flying Officer Kite, the leg you flew on is the 3rd SOU departure of the day from LBA, at only 1030am, it's madness, I think it was always going to struggle. I've seen as little as 6 on a Dash from LBA to ABZ. I'd hazard a guess not much money is being earned by either operator.

Aren't TE's fares consistently higher than BE's?

So alongside screwing up the MAN-IOM schedule (see IOM thread) to miss the hub banks at MAN and move to less attractive times, the NCL-SOU schedule is being changed from Summer 2015 to accommodate the awfully-timed NCL-STN service.

First departure ex NCL to SOU will now be 1225 on weekdays as the aircraft which does the northbound SOU-NCL does NCL-STN-NCL before flying the first southbound. The afternoon NCL-STN is being flown by a BHD-based aircraft.

Why, oh why, would you make a total mess of schedules on two long-established routes to launch new routes (IOM-STN and NCL-STN) at poor timings themselves? This is an airline losing the plot in a big way.

How can you be so cynical ?!
I'm sure Deano777 will put you straight !

Although this seasonal route does not appear to operate in 2015.

Kockayne how old are you? 65 or 6?

However old he is it's quite a funny comment.

Deano777

Just a bit of sarcasm which appealed to me in the light of Flybe's management being not able to do anything wrong.

I see FlyBe have axed a number of flights from their SOU schedule with routes dropped or services reduced. Have they overestimated their 'London' operations with STN, SOU & LCY all being used?

Just got a London City Inverness flight for £70. For tomorrow.

Given the ho-ha from the Highlands when Inverness loses a service I'm surprised how poorly this route performed.