Under the re-launched flightmapping.com website, there is a news and blog section.
New blog posts will be posted there.
James
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Ryanair Reserved Seating Extended
Ryanair have now extended their reserved seating to cover all flights – but the service is still only available for the first two rows and for the extra legroom seats by the over-wing emergency exits.
The service costs €10 per person per flight sector. Other passengers can still pay €5 for priority boarding.
Does this make you any more likely to fly with Ryanair?
When flights to hub airports are still cheaper if you go indirect
If you want to reach many destinations from regional airports like Birmingham, Manchester or Glasgow, you would expect to take a connecting flight through a major European hub airport.
But what about when you want flights to that hub itself? You would have thought that there would be enough capacity on the route for it to be cheaper to go direct with the airline which operates that hub facility. As it happens, the opposite is often the case, even when flights via that hub are cheaper than direct flights to the other hub.
Looking at flights to 10 hub airports served by direct and connecting flights from Birmingham, we found the following:
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Hub airport
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Airline
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Direct £
|
Indirect £
|
Premium%
|
Airline
|
Via
|
| Brussels | Brussels Airlines | 255 | 200 | 28 | KLM | AMS |
| Copenhagen | SAS | 208 | 151 | 57 | KLM-AF | AMS / CDG |
| Dubai | Emirates | 470 | 339 | 131 | Swiss | ZRH |
| Frankfurt | Lufthansa | 396 | 151 | 245 | KLM | AMS |
| Istanbul | Turkish | 183 | 161 | 22 | KLM | AMS |
| Munich | Lufthansa | 193 | 151 | 42 | KLM | AMS |
| New York | Continental* | 437 | 369 | 68 | KLM-DL | AMS |
| Zurich | Swiss | 193 | 161 | 32 | KLM-AF | AMS / CDG |
Flight prices were searched using Expedia.co.uk for a 1 week trip (therefore including a Saturday night stay and often being cheaper), between 1st and 8th December. Only flights to Paris and Amsterdam were cheaper direct – hardly surprising considering how close they are, but Brussels still worked out more expensive to go direct.
Now these dates might be quite soon, but they are still before the mid-December Christmas rush. Looking forward to March next year, prices for direct flights to Brussels, Frankfurt, Munich and Zurich fell below the prices for flight connections.
This shows that the network carriers are still charging hefty premiums for direct flights. This seems to fly in the face of environmental concerns over short haul flights being the most polluting – and two short haul flights when one will often do being particularly bad for the environment.
The low cost airlines have shown that point to point routes are what the customers want, and that they shouldn’t need to pay for the privilege. Most low cost airlines actively shun transfer passengers, as if one flight is late, they don’t want to deal with missed connections, and their smallprint makes it clear that they are your problem, not theirs.
Yet, of the routes featured, none have a low cost alternative from Birmingham. At a push, you could fly to Paris with Flybe, and then take Thalys to Brussels, or if your dates were flexible, you could find a cheap flight to Geneva and then train it to Zurich.
So will the legacy airlines ever wake up to the idea that direct flights should be cheaper for them to operate, better for the environment, and therefore cheaper for the consumer? Not without a heft taxation penalty against them, and UK Air Passenger Duty is onerous enough as it is. In the meantime, they will continue to charge more for the convenience of a direct service, especially if there isn’t a realistic low cost alternative.
Notes:
- *Continental dates were 2nd-9th December. No direct Continental flights found in March 2012.
- AF = Air France, DL = Delta
- AMS = Amsterdam, CDG = Paris CDG, ZRH = Zurich
Airport Access Information – Distances from City Centres and Public Transport Options
A feature we’ve had most of the data for a long time is to show what public transport connections are available from each airport to the centre of the main city it serves. As with anything, data needs to be cross-checked, so we’re initially including this information just on cities which have more than one airport served by direct flights from the UK and / or Ireland.
We’ve added two separate columns for the core information. We will shortly be adapting all pages over to a new template, and this will include a further detailed breakdown of public transport information, such as timings and sample fares. For now, we include the actual distance (shortest road journey) from the city centre to the airport, and an icon for the best form of public transport available. Even if some airports served by high speed trains might have much faster access to the city centre than those which only have a bus link, the actual distance is still important, as it will determine the likely fares for getting to the city centre, whether by public transport or taxi.
Distances:
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Airport is very far from city centre (more than 50km / 30 miles)
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Typical airport
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Airport is close to the city centre (less than 16 km / 10 miles
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To view sample distances (for cities with 2+ airports), please visit our countries page, and select any major city with multiple airports – these are most common in the USA, Germany and Italy.
Public Transport
To view sample distances (for cities with 2+ airports), please visit our countries page.
Public Transport
We also have plenty of information about the standards of public transport in most of the cities we feature on our site. This will evolve into our sister site, @carornocar, which looks at the pros and cons of renting a car versus public transport in numerous cities around the world.
As always, comments and feedback are most welcome.
JA
Is Turku an alternative for flights to Helsinki?
Whenever Ryanair start cheap flights to somewhere new, we always wonder whether or not they are also trying to appeal to passengers to use their new airport as an alternative to an existing major city airport.
Sometimes they will make a big song and dance about it (e.g. Memmingen for Munich), even when the alternative is ambitious at best. Yet sometimes, the opposite can be the case – Ryanair may not actively promote a destination as being an alternative, but passengers might still use it, especially if the main city airport is congested or expensive to fly into.
So, is Turku a realistic ‘Helsinki West’?
In many ways, even if it is, this is only in supplement to Ryanair’s long established flights to Tampere – with both cities being just under a 2 hours drive away from Helsinki. Although the train journey from Turku to Helsinki is also around 2 hours, the journey from Tampere is a faster run – taking just 90 minutes.
Despite these short distances, there are actually operational flight routes between Helsinki and both Turku and Tampere, operated by Flybe Nordic on behalf of Finnair. So this would be a rare case of a Ryanair alternative city actually being so far away from the other city that you can actually fly over the distance. Yet, on the face of it, these extremely short internal flights seem utterly pointless – a bit like Flybe operating flights from Birmingham to Gatwick, and exactly the sort of thing that would get Friends of the Earth hopping mad.
So is there really a big cost saving by taking ‘cheap’ flights to Tampere or Turku instead? Going on base prices, Ryanair offer little saving over fierce Nordic rivals Fly Norwegian, especially as the latter does not charge for hidden extras like debit car payments. Unfortunately, the market for budget flights to Helsinki is not as competitive as it has been, now that easyJet no longer offer any flights to Finland, and Blue1 just offer flights to Helsinki from Edinburgh.
Helsinki Airport lags behind its Scandinavian rivals in that Oslo, Copenhagen and Stockholm airports all have fast and direct rail links to their respective city centres. Yet, even on the slow bus, it is still far easier to get to the centre of Helsinki from Helsinki airport than from the other two.
In fact, the question should really be the other way round – to what extent is Helsinki airport still the best option for reaching Turku, Tampere and other cities in southern Finland which have airports? In the case of Tampere, you can even take a short (10-15 minute) bus or taxi ride to nearby Tikkurila station, from where the train to Tampere takes just 75 minutes.
As with any destination, it is always worth mixing and matching in and outbound flights, so you can see both cities for not much more (and sometimes even less) than the price of visiting one. Considering that Helsinki Vantaa Airport is a delightful icon of Finnish design, we would suggest flying into Turku or Tampere and out of Helsinki.
New flights to Finland? Don’t forget the ferries!
So Ryanair have announced new flights from Stansted to the port of Turku in Finland – or at least port is the way we would rather think of it!
This is still another niche destination that Ryanair have added to their list – complementing their existing flights to Tampere, to the north east. Both of these destinations could be considered as alternative gateways to Helisnki, although I would strongly advise checking out the best fares for direct flights to Helsinki first.
But the real beauty of Finland, especially when you fly to destinations outside the capital, must surely lie in its wonderful and never-ending array of scenic coastline and inland lakes? This is certainly a great part of Europe to drive around, but to appreciate it at its best, you really need to take to the water.
Turku is gateway port for numerous islands just off the shore, but also for more ‘serious’ ferries to the enclave of Mariehamn, and even on to Stockholm. I have personally taken the overnight ferry from Stockholm to Helsinki as part of a Nordic ‘surface trip’ (I can’t call it a road trip, as most of it was by rail or ferry). These superferries really are like floating villages – but unlike cruise liners, you feel like you are actually going somewhere to.
With the various different low cost airlines serving southern Finland and the Stockholm area, it is easy to fly outbound to one, and back from the other – and there is certainly no reason to assume that just because Ryanair go there, they are your best or only option.
Peak Oil? What about offpeak oil?
As I do my daily rounds of the blog world, twitter and Facebook, the term ‘peak oil’ rears its ugly head from time to time, and I am automatically left thinking ‘what about offpeak oil’?
I don’t want to flippantly dismiss serious concerns about energy supply (not my core topic of ranting), but I am frequently reminded of the farce that governs congestion on roads in the UK, and elsewhere in the world. Whilst the airline industry, and to a lesser extent the rail industry (European railway networks are slowly catching up) has long since adapted to the notion that the price of tickets is a commodity which rises and falls with demand, except in limited cases (bridges, M6 Toll, London Congestion Charge), there is no such mechanism to govern usage of our roads.
Now, of course, there would be no point in altering the cost of petrol at the pumps – people would just buy when the station is quiet and use later – so the answer must lie in some form of road pricing. This was understandably dismissed previously, as public distrust of the last government meant that it was seen as just another stealth tax.
No we have a new transport minister, is it time to look again at a demand-led road pricing system, offset by a reduction in the price of petrol?
This would at least mean that the cost of driving would be lower during off-peak hours, and there would be a dis-incentive against driving during peak hours, when congestion makes fuel consumption higher.
Every little helps.