Monthly Archives: March 2007

Stung by Flybe, trod on a hornets’ nest

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We ran an article on Flightmapping last week about dropping adverts for Flybe, because they has asked for all affiliate marketing activity to be suspended. The reason for this was quite clearly stated – they were approaching the financial year end, and the budget had reached its limit.

Then they told us that it was all a mis-understanding, they just wanted affiliates (sites like ourselves) to cool things down a bit, and actually we could carry on advertising them, but could we just tone down any suggestion about them being short of cash?

We made a few small changes to the story, but they then wanted us to go further, explaining exactly how we’d made this mis-understanding, and adding some general comment about what a nice airline they were.

Unfortunately, we just can’t do that, and our commercial arrangements with them are suspended by mutual disagreement, with immediate effect.

For further details about this (from the perspective of the affiliate industry), please see my personal blog post on the subject. 

 

 

We must stop this obsession with domestic flights

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It seems that the Conservative party have blindly jumped on the directionless and disingenuous bandwagon which seeks to penalise people who take domestic flights within the UK. Last week, the Independent carried a front-page article about British Airways’ new flights to Newquay, claiming that the airline was being irresponsible by starting a new domestic route — even if this service was merely a reallocation of a previous Glasgow rotation!Of course, the industry needs to cover its environmental costs, but in the rush to go carbon crazy, we seem to be shooting ourselves in the foot when it comes to protecting our own domestic market. As coverage of the British travel trade fair in Birmingham has pointed out, 80% of the UK tourism market is fed by domestic visitors, yet anyone who chooses to fly to internal destinations is now being penalised by two sets of air passenger duty, instead of just one. How can we persuade a family of four from Belfast to take a short break in London, which is already one of the most expensive cities in Europe, when they will have to fork out £80 in air passenger duty? Instead, this family could drive down to Dublin airport, and take a short break to Spain, and pay no air passenger duty at all on the outbound journey, and a mere €5.78 each on the return — despite the fact that the flight to Spain will be almost 3 times as far.At least bed tax proposals seem to have been dropped for now, but if we are going to be serious about asking more people to take their holidays in the UK, then this will inevitably mean we will have to build more accommodation facilities along the South Coast. This will no doubt bring the travel industry back into conflict with an untold number of nimby groups, crewed by the very people who are trying to stop us from flying to more distant destinations.

Whilst any policy measures to encourage the development of more high-speed rail routes should be broadly encouraged, the West Coast Mainline upgrade has already shown us just how massively over budget these projects can run — so much so that the (allegedly unpaid) carbon cost of a flight from Birmingham to Edinburgh is significantly less than the subsidy handed out to the railways for the short train journey from Birmingham New Street to the airport!

Any transport infrastructure needs to balance its social and environmental impacts with its financial costs, but it would be disastrous to give the rail industry blank cheques in the name of combating global warming, especially as domestic flights make up such a tiny proportion of aviation’s contribution to the problem.

 

 

Nantes to Aberdeen flights?

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According to Christopher Rodrigues, chairman of Visit Britain, no frills flights could be a blessing for British tourism. He commented that there is a potential for the inbound UK market to be exploited at every overseas airport, but then remarked that no one would have thought 10 years ago that there would be direct Nantes to Aberdeen flights.

I wasn’t aware that these flights existed now, and to be honest, I think that’s one route which still won’t exist in 10 years time, but who knows?

Virgin America

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There have been plenty of strong words said this week about the ongoing negotiations between the EU and the USA about open skies agreements, but one airline which seems to have been relatively quiet on this issue is Virgin Atlantic.

It is well known that however much Richard Branson loves to take on his competitors, Virgin still have quite a nice little arrangement at Heathrow, which prevents rivals like BMI, and European airlines like Lufthansa, from operating competing flights against them to the USA.

Meanwhile, preparations are well under way for the start of Virgin America, which is set to launch no frills flights from San Francisco this summer. Airline ownership is a big part of the open skies negotiations, but it looks like Virgin have found enough local partners to enable them to get started under the current regulations.