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Please post any questions about flight routes you would like to see, or have brought back:

Flightmapping now has a new user group on Facebook. Drop in and say hi, and share your travel stories with us.

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2351507165

I will be speaking at the Eye For Travel summit in London tomorrow. Below is my reply to some questions sent by the conference organisers. 

1.    What in your opinion have been the latest trends when it comes to affiliate marketers using search in an optimal manner?

I suppose the one basic trend is that affiliate marketers are often much better at SEO than merchants!  This might sound arrogant, but it is simply a question of resource allocation. Most travel companies are in business to put bums on seats - but actually providing these services, or even providing booking technology, is not the same thing as creating relevant content and playing the never ending Google game.

With the constant cat and mouse race between white hat and black hat (ethical and allegedly unethical) SEO techniques, it is always going to be far easier for affiliates to take risks, than it is for large-scale corporate merchants. Ultimately, there will always be some merchants out there who view affiliate marketing as an unnecessary cost, but I certainly think that affiliates are a very good value proposition, and an excellent return on investment, compared to outsourcing search engine marketing activities, which can often be extremely risky.

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I’ve just go back from a few days in Switzerland, and will do a full flight (and train journey) report later.

In the meantime, I guess I am having one of those “Q moments”, which I guess is justified, as this does relate to somewhere just round the corner from Blofeld’s Alpine hideout.

This was my 5th trip to Switzerland, and the fourth time I have visited the Jungfrau region. For those who aren’t complete geeks like myself, this area is famous for its stunning mountain scenery, which has been tamed by a plethora of cable cars and mountain railways.

Of course, I’ll admit that my first interest in the Bernese Oberland was from the Bond film “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service”, but I was amazed at the time to find out about Jungfraujoch, which is also accessible from Interlaken. Quite how I hadn’t previously heard of this excursion, which takes visitors to the highest station in Europe, is beyond me, but this was back in December 2001.

Despite making various repeat visits, one particular spot which had elluded me was Bachalpsee, a lake above the village of Grindelwald, which offers a stunning backdrop of the trio of the Eiger, Monch and Jungfrau.

This location, perhaps together with the view of the Matterhorn from the Gornergrat railway, should create that picture perfect “mountains reflected in a lake” image, like the one on the right.

I tend to book Switzerland trips at the last minute, which isn’t always the best option for a country which has a reputation for being pricey. However, as Switzerland tends to be an escape from office mayhem, these trips tend to get called at rather short noticed, rather than get planned meticulously in advance.

So my weather forecast check last Thursday, when I decided to make the trip, was decidedly optimistic. Yes, at the time, Interlaken was expected to have a reasonable dose of sun, but this had changed for the worse by the time I got there on Sunday evening. Having decided to give up, and head south to Lugano (with a Swiss rail pass, plans can be changed quite easily), I got up on Wednesday morning to bright sunshine, and not a cloud in the sky. So, was there a possbility of making it up to Bachalpsee?

I left the hotel just before 11am (I’m never one for early starts), by which time a few clouds were peppering the sky. In my haphazard mode, I asked in Interlaken Ost (East) station if the cable car up to First was open. I was told it wasn’t, but that the walk to Bachalpsee would take “just about 2 hours”. As I’ll explain later, never rely on local advice - both of these answers were wrong - the cable car (fortunately) was open, but the walk from Grindelwald would have taken 3 hours 10 minutes, according to the signposts. Normally, I would work on a time of around 2/3rds of this, but this would have been very ambitious on the day in question.

Mountain walking in Switzerland can be very deceptive - most of the paths are extremely well signposted, and many of the difficult bits can be skipped by jumping into a cable car. However, it is still only mid May, and the snowline was well below the cable car station at First. From here, the 2/3rds rule worked - the guide suggests a one hour walk to Bachalpsee, and it took me 40 minutes.

On the way, I passed a couple of other walkers who had decided to turn back, but I wasn’t going to give up on my pursuit of this spot. Reaching Bachalpsee initially seemed like a bit of an anticlimax - of course, the lake was frozen, so none of the reflections I had envisaged from the postcard photos. Another group of walkers were looking down on the bleak bowl which contained the frozen lake, with underwhelmed expressions on their faces.

I decided to at least walk round to the other side of the lake. The clouds looked ominous, but visibility was still good. I took a few photos of the view across the frozen lake, with mountains behind, not really expecting anything too impressive. The images were taking using a wide angle lens, and a polarizing filter. As with any trip, I’ve got several folders worth to go through, but as Q would say, this one I am particularly proud of:

And yes, this is a colour picture!

So here comes another airline with a stupid name, this time operating two new routes from Dundee, with predictable help from the Scottish parliament’s route development fund.  Just exactly how much demand is there for flights to Dundee?  Theoretically, the airport offers an excellent marketing proposition, with a superb location on the banks of the River Tay, and one of the shortest airport to city centre transfer times available.  Here lies the problem — is the centre of Dundee top of the destination wish list for passengers who regularly take flights from either Belfast or Birmingham?

Dundee’s current schedule revolves pretty much entirely around Scot Airways’ four daily flights to London City Airport.  As a general rule, there is almost always going to be a far bigger demand for flights to London, than there is to any other city in the British Isles, so how much commercial logic would there be in operating twice daily flights from Birmingham to Dundee, especially when Flywhoosh are operating with ATR42 aircraft, a notably larger piece of kit than the Dornier 328s used by Scot Airways.

No doubt, the business community has been consulted, and surveys have shown that there is demand for more flights from Dundee, but ask anyone if they want better transport links, and they will almost certainly say that they do.  Perhaps Dundee lacks more connections with London because its own airport is too tightly constrained to handle the larger jets that an airline like Ryanair would want to bring in there.  On the other hand, Dundee’s problem might simply be a question of catchment area.  Again, I’m sure that Dundee airport’s marketing department could produce a statistic showing that there are so many hundreds of thousands of people living within a one hour drive, but travellers in Fife are already going to be very well accustomed to using Edinburgh airport for most of their flights, and occasionally defecting to Glasgow International or Prestwick when a good deal from Edinburgh is not available.

There has been previous talk of an overspill facility to handle the extra demand for flights to and from central Scotland, but neither Birmingham nor Belfast are in need of any such extra links. Both are well connected with Edinburgh and Glasgow, courtesy of competition between Flybe and Bmibaby (Birmingham) and Easyjet (Belfast) respectively.

So what are Flywhoosh about?  Is there really a gap in the market for another regional airline using turboprops to connect disparate parts of the British Isles?  There are certainly plenty of routes which are ripe for development, but airlines like Eastern, Flybe, Aer Arran and Air Southwest will have already cherry picked the best links.  Meanwhile, this field is further crowded by airlines like VLM, who are the main player at London city airport, and EuroManx, who are based in the Isle of Man. 

So who are Flywhoosh?  Well, if ever there was a clue in the name, then we have it here — other reports about this start-up airline have commented on its usage of a Polish Air Operator’s Certificate.  In the single European market, country of origin is pretty irrelevant, but it is very interesting to see Aden Murcott come back to the scene so quickly.  Mr Murcott was previously CEO of none other than Flywho, the premium service leisure airline which never got off the ground.  After three summers of false starts, Flywho finally disappeared from the scene late last year, after BBC Watchdog exposed them to selling flights without the correct bonding.

Will Mr Murcott’s extensive sales skills be better applied on this new operation? Clearly, he’s had no trouble convincing the bureaucrats who are there to write subsidy cheques on our behalf, but is this venture really going to be sustainable once the development funds run out?  Perhaps we shouldn’t be focused too much on a name, but “Flywhoosh” is really just “Flywho” + “osh”.  Caveat emptor!

Further information:

• Flywhoosh - Aden Murcott takes on critics
• Flightmapping profile - Flywhoosh
• Dundee flights

I have just got one of those consumer survey stories through, which claims that online consumers will turn immediately to a competitor if they read a bad review.  Of course, there is a great deal of truth in this, but any kind of press release on these issues needs to be backed by a bit of credibility.  The survey was done by the digital marketing agency Tamar, who are well known on the search engine industry circuit.  The problem is that a company like this has a clear agenda to sell “online reputation management solutions” to its clients, many of whom will bite at this kind of story.

The survey claims that if consumers really bad review when they are searching for a travel company by name, then 58% of them would book with an alternative provider, whereas 42% of them would stop their search session.  This seems to make the assumption that 100% of consumers who read a bad review will end up turning away from the travel company in question.  The survey then goes on to claim that:

 ”one of the most high-profile travel companies to suffer as a result of natural search results, reducing a plethora of negative reviews is budget airline Ryanair.”

If this claim were true, then surely, Ryanair would have already lost 100% of their business? For all the obvious reasons, Ryanair are still the black sheep amongst large swathes of the travel industry, be it online or offline — just as they are amongst numerous consumer groups, politicians and environmentalists. But just because the airline generates large quantities of negative publicity, does that mean that they should be worried?  Clearly, Ryanair’s incessant rise in passenger numbers suggests otherwise.

This does not mean that consumer reviews don’t have their place, but it does mean that expectations have to be managed.  People seem to love telling stories about Ryanair, whether they have flown with them or not.  Ryanair are the one airline to thrive on the age-old adage that no publicity is bad publicity.  The statistics however speak for themselves — Ryanair carry more passengers on more on-time flights than any other airline, and they also lose a few of their passengers’ bags in the process. 

So does this tell the whole story?  Not entirely — Ryanair tend to use airports which are much less congested, and therefore less prone to delays. Meanwhile, charging passengers to check their luggage in, and only operating point-to-point schedules, also ensures that they have far fewer opportunities to lose bags, compared to network carriers like British Airways.

Would I recommend flying with Ryanair, given a like-for-like comparison on the same route?  Such direct comparisons are very difficult to make, as there are very few examples of Ryanair operating flights directly against a competitor — i.e. from the same departure airport to the same arrival airport.  I can reach the check-in desks of either Birmingham or Coventry airport within 15 minutes of leaving my house, and as neither these are Ryanair strongholds, their rivals tend to start with a significant advantage.  If I’m trying to get to somewhere a little bit more adventurous (both Coventry and Birmingham still offer a pretty conservative choice of destinations, although Birmingham is looking a lot more interesting this summer), then I would look briefly at flights from East Midlands airport, before considering flying from London. 

The last time I flew with Ryanair was just over a year ago, when I went with a friend to Palermo in Sicily.  On that particular occasion, Ryanair were the only airline flying there, and as the friend in question not only lives within 30 minutes’ drive of Stansted, but also gets free parking there, the choice of departure airport wasn’t really an issue either.

Ultimately, I’ll always pay a bit extra to use more convenient airport, and to know that I can reserve a window seat at check-in.  Much as though I think reliability is important, Ryanair’s punctuality can also be counterbalanced by the fact that they generally operate a much lower frequency of flights, and provide very little assistance when things do go wrong.

So should Michael O’Leary be quaking in his boots because Flightmapping says that Ryanair are a long way from being our favourite airline? We very much doubt it — our whole point in existence is to provide route information about which airlines offer flights to which destinations. Any commentary that we provide is always going to lean towards the most direct option, whereas Ryanair are more likely to take you to a field in the middle of nowhere. 

One mantra that Ryanair repeatedly spew out is that lowest cost always wins.  This might well be true for the vast majority of passengers, but this site has always been much more focused on providing information for people who know where they want to go, and who will value finding the most direct way of getting there above the price they have to pay. 

This doesn’t mean that we don’t think the price is important, it is just that we like to look at the whole picture, instead of just the baseline cost, which can often be so misleading anyway.  Fortunately for Ryanair, most people don’t think that way, so even if I had decided to go on a massive tirade against them, they would have still filled another load of flights in the time you read this article!

If ever there was an award for a stupidly named airline, it would have to go to the Swiss regional airline Darwin Airlines. Do they not know that everyone associates Charles Darwin with the theory of evolution?

Much as though we Brits should be honoured by their selection of one of our greatest national heroes, any mention of the name on the internet always comes up with associations with the Darwin Awards, which are given to people who remove themselves from the gene pool in the most humourous way.

So when I first heard of Darwin Airlines, my natural response was “how long before they become extinct?”. Well, thankfully, they have survived. After a few go-arounds trying to get my credit card details right, my own process of natural selection was heading rapidly back towards Easyjet. Somehow, I succeeded on my final attempt, so I am going to check their services out next Friday, with a flight from Berne to London City.

I’ve always enjoyed visiting Switzerland, and I guess it tops my list of places to head to to switch off, and get away from it all for a few days.

The only problem is that it is never quite as easy to get to as I’d like - especially with our “rules” about trying out as many different airlines and airports as possible, which make finding cheap flights to Switzerland a complete nightmare:

1. Trying to work out flight combinations.
2. Shall I get a Swiss Rail Pass before going?
3. Am I going to do any biking? If so, will I take my bike with me - certainly not this time!

When I travel, I usually like to as many visit different places as possible, but sometimes I just want to get away, and stay a few nights in the same place. Even before running Flightmapping, I would rarely stay in the same hotel twice, and would always try our a different airline / routing over a tried and tested one.

However, when I spend most of my time looking into flight routings, sometimes it is nice to get back to a bit of familiarity. So even though I am finally getting to test out flights from Berne, I will be staying again at Balmers in Interlaken, which is often rated as one of the best hostels in the world.

There are still very few hotels or hotels out there that I have stayed in more than once. Last month, I managed to notch up a third visit to the Radisson in Manchester, but I guess that hotel will always feel special because of its historical assocations with the Free Trade Hall. This will be my fourth visit to Balmers - so I guess that comes as quite a glowing testimonial from someone with very itchy feet.

This time, I must finally make it up to see the stunning views from Bachalpsee. And I’ll make sure I’ve got the right walking gear.

Flight reviews to follow shortly:

1. London Gatwick to Geneva (BA)
2. Berne to London City (Darwin Airlines)

It is a pity that Cheap Flights have chosen to stop working with affiliate sites like ourselves, but I am told they have some site modifications to make. They have made no secret of the fact that they intend to float later on in the year.

Cheap Flights published turnoved (according to recent travel trade press) is £18m. Profit margins are reported as being “healthy”, but have been previously reported as “around 20%”.

Their business model is largely based on some good “organic” search listings on Google, which are highly volatile - even that hallowed “#1 for cheap flights” has been knocked a few times recently. Cheap Flights is  a useful comparison tool on some routes, but the site provides no information about two of the largest airlines which actually provide cheap flights (Easyjet and Ryanair).

Sure, its a great domain, so if this business is really worth £200-250m, then that has to be great inspiration for all the other tavel websites out there. Assuming the 20% profit margin, their annual profits would be £3.6m, so we’re talking about multiples of 55 - extremely positive for an internet business.