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?
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:
|
Hub airport
|
Airline
|
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:
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.
As I see that the Birmingham Airport twitter feed has many comments about the runway extension and the High Speed 2 railway proposals, I thought it was worth a quick reminder of just how many major European capital cities are not served by flights from Birmingham Airport.
Now I’m not just talking about Vaduz or Andorra-la-Vella, which don’t even have airports, these are major European capital cities, including the capital of the largest country in the EU (Germany), aswell as other major players such as the Spanish capital Madrid and the Polish capital Warsaw. Even Lisbon and Rome will not get Birmingham flights until the end of March 2012.
European capitals not served by flights from Birmingham
(but these are served by flights from Manchester or other UK regional airports):
| City | Birmingham | Manchester | Edinburgh |
Notes
|
| Athens |  |
 |
|
(previously operated by various airlines) |
| Berlin | |
|
|
(previously operated by BACON) |
| Helsinki | |
|
|
|
| Lisbon | (YES) | |
|
(new route starts 31 March 2012) |
| Moscow | |
|
|
|
| Oslo | |
|
|
(previously by Ryanair to TRF?) |
| Rome | (YES) | |
|
(new route starts 25 March 2012) |
| Stockholm | |
|
|
(previously by Ryanair to NYO?) |
| Vienna | |
|
|
|
| Warsaw | |
|
|
(previously operated by Norwegian) |
Now, surely I’m not being fair on Birmingham here? Aren’t there many other European capitals and major cities which are served by flights from Birmingham?
European Capital* Cities which are served by Birmingham flights:
| City | Birmingham | Manchester | Edinburgh | |
| Amsterdam* | |
|
|
|
| Brussels | |
|
|
|
| Copenhagen | |
|
|
|
| Dublin | |
|
|
|
| Istanbul* | |
|
|
|
| Paris | |
|
|
|
| Prague | |
|
|
|
| Zurich* | |
|
|
In virtually all of the above cases, other the cities served from Birmingham are also served from Edinburgh. European cities which are served by Birmingham flights, but not by flights from Manchester, are few and far between.
If there is any unfairness, it is that there are numerous cities in Germany which are both more commercially important than Berlin, and which are served from Birmingham. Yet, Berlin is still important in its own right, both for business, and as a key city break destination. If there are flights to Berlin from several other UK airports, then why not from Birmingham, especially as the new Brandenburg Airport should create an opportunity for new routes.
Surely, it would be easier to create incentives for the airlines already at Birmingham to open up new routes to some of these key cities, rather than chasing much harder to win contracts for flights to Asia, which have so far failed to materialise in any great way from Manchester, and which would be even less likely to work from Birmingham, given its proxmimity to London. And why should anyone fork out a hefty High Speed 2 rail fare to arrive in some field right on the edge of the Birmingham Airport complex, when Virgin Trains will take them to within a two minute shuttle ride of the main terminal building, with an only marginally longer journey time?
Notes:
Next Monday sees the last Aer Arran flights from Galway, as the airline says they are no longer competitive. This marks the death knell for the airport in terms of passenger flights, but unlike in the UK, airport bosses can’t blame air passenger duty for their own failings. It looks like improved road links between Galway and Dublin have a lot more to do with it.
Aer Arann flights had operated to Lorient in France, and Edinburgh, London Luton, London Southend and Manchester in the UK. Domestic flights to Waterford were also available.
Could Galway be rescued by Ryanair? This can’t happen, as the runway at Wateford, being just under 1,300m long, is too short to be able to handle Ryanair’s Boeing 737-800 jets. British regional airlines like Eastern and Flybe do have the right kind of aircaft to operate commercial flights from Galway, but they are unlikely to be interested in operating any of the routes Aer Arann have cancelled, as if they can’t work for them, they are unlikely to work for another airline. One possible exception might be London – Flybe have a well established operation at Gatwick, which is better connected to central London than either Southend or Luton. Flybe already operate a small selection of other flights to Ireland from their various UK regional bases. They might just be tempted to look at Gatwick to Galway flights, but don’t count on it.
At a time when budget airlines are increasingly being criticised over their ever-extending list of unavoidable extra charges, there is perhaps one area where they are being even more brazen, and this is when it comes to adding on a hire car to their flight booking process.
We looked at flights to Malaga from all the major budget airlines which offer flights from the UK to Spain, and this time compared the cost of the car hire for one week, rather than just looking at the cost of the flights to Malaga, which showed relatively little variance in price, even from different UK regional airports.
Out of six airlines we looked at, five included a car hire quote as part of the booking process, which customers had to opt out of in order to avoid booking through the airline’s partner. Jet2 was the only airline not to include an opt-out-only car hire booking quote, so this had to be looked up separately.
In most cases, the airlines have entered into an affiliate agreement with a major car hire provider — Hertz in the case of Aer Lingus and Ryanair, Europcar with easyJet and Avis with Flybe. In all of these four cases, the cost of a hire car was substantially more than the cost quoted using car hire comparison engines, with Aer Lingus working out at the most expensive at £312.80, a staggering 627% more than the cheapest price. Of the airlines which gave a direct booking option, Ryanair were the cheapest at £122.99, even though this was also booked through Hertz.
Meanwhile, the Bmibaby were by far the cheapest of the airlines which included car hire booking as part of the flight booking process, as they are powered by car hire comparison engine Cartrawler, who compare prices across a number of different car hire companies, instead of sticking to just one major brand.The price with Bmibaby was £67.48, but even this was still more than half as expensive again as the cheapest option.
Jet2 were the cheapest of the airlines we looked at, coming in at £51.06, and this was through their Jet2cars.com website, which is powered by Carhire3000.
| AIRLINE | PARTNER | COST |
| RYANAIR | HERTZ | £122.99 |
| EASYJET | EUROPCAR | £129.00 |
| AER LINGUS | HERTZ | £312.80 |
| BMIBABY | CARTRAWLER | £67.48 |
| FLYBE | AVIS | £157.98 |
| JET2 | CARHIRE3000 | £51.06 |
Cheapest Malaga Airport Car Hire
So what was the cheapest option? We looked at two leading car hire price comparison websites — carrentals.co.uk and carhiresearch.co.uk, and both gave us car options for just £43.
Conclusions
Car hire might well be an optional extra on low-cost airline websites, but users still need to make sure they opt out of it to avoid being charged.
These airlines aren’t stupid, so we can only assume that they have done their calculations, and they know that they will get a certain percentage of people who will opt in at these prices. Quite how anyone will pay over £300 for a week’s basic off-season car rental in Malaga is beyond us, but Aer Lingus clearly seem to think that some people will. The lowest prices we looked at might be for the very cheapest model car with less well known agencies, but the price differences are still vast. Where is the logic in booking cheap flights and expensive car hire?
Do you need a car for a visit to Malaga?
Meanwhile, another option is to consider whether or not you need a hire car at your destination in the first place. We are developing a new website, Carornocar.com, to provide advice on car hire and public transport options in a range of destinations around the world. Do you think a hire car is necessary to make the best out of a trip to Malaga and the surrounding Andalusia region? Or can you get around without one? See what we say, and let us know whether you agree or not – Car Or No Car’s Malaga Car Hire Verdict.
Notes:
I have just been offered the opportunity to ‘think’ about an Air France flight until the weekend – for a non-refundable fee of £5. I think other airlines are doing this, and will expand on this shortly.
Hve you ever used such a service? Personally, I prefer to just get on and make the booking – but if I don’t book there and then, and I’m booking reasonably far ahead, I really don’t see how holding the fare would make that much difference.