Have Ryanair quietly axed Inverness flights from Liverpool?
It looks like Ryanair have stopped offering cheap flights from Liverpool to Inverness for the upcoming winter season.
Ryanair are quite often very happy to say which routes don’t perform well, but this seems to be one they have let go of quietly. Unfortunately, when it comes to confirming these details, Ryanair’s website is one of the most cumbersome out there. There is no quick way of checking timetable details, so users have to scroll back and forth through the dates they are interested in finding flights for.
This is, I’m afraid, yet another example of Ryanair’s needless unhelpfulness. So in the time it takes me to write this blog, I have got as far as confirming that there are no flights between Wednesdays and Saturdays in November. OK - can now confirm this route doesn’t operate on any days in November. Checking back through Ryanair’s booking form confirms that these flights do indeed end on 26th October.
So, we can expect the usual questions about why a route which appears to have been popular, both with point to point travellers, and people making their own onward connections from Liverpool, has been axed.
Our understanding is that these flights were indeed relatively full. There is certainly room for competition on this route, as passengers who have got used to Ryanair’s cheap flights to Inverness will now have to make do with Eastern’s services from an alternative airport like Manchester or Birmingham.
The clue lies in the probable reason for Ryanair offering cheap Inverness flights in the first place. Budget airlines like Ryanair do everything they can to get the best usage out of their aircraft, and this process involves carefully matching up city combinations, so that each plane can perform a maximum number of “rotations” (out and back trips) in one day. Sometimes, the schedule results in a time slot of, let’s say, 2 1/2 hours, into which they need to fit a return trip.
We have always suspected that destinations like Inverness and Aberdeen suit Ryanair’s purposes in this respect very well. In the case of Ryanair’s Aberdeen flights, the “yields” (i.e. the revenue the airline earns for each passenger) seem notably above those for Inverness, so the route seems likely to stay - for the time being at least. In the case of Inverness, it looks like even if Ryanair were making money, they can now make more money by moving their aircraft around to serve other routes.
June 21st, 2007 at 2:31 pm
I can confirm that this flight was well used. I travelled the route on at least 6 occasions and each time I would say it was 75% or more full, even off-peak times. Maybe I am wrong, but sad to see the link go if true.
June 21st, 2007 at 2:56 pm
Hamish,
This doesn’t surprise me, but Ryanair arwe very ruthless about cutting routes which don’t suit them.
This sounds like a reasonable occupancy rate for a domestic flight, but the key figure will have been the amount passengers were actually paying each time. If you don’t mind me asking, what was the average price you paid for these flights?
June 26th, 2007 at 9:49 am
I paid anything from £0.99 to £30 before taxes, so not much! Perhaps that has something to do with it…