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May 1, 2009

New flights to Athens from Birmingham?

Filed under: Routes & News — Tags: Asia, Birmingham airport, Boeing 74 --200, Embraer E195, flights from Birmingham, Flights to Athens, flights to Jeddah, flights to Riyadh, Flybe, Greece, Haj flights, Hellenic Imperial Airways, Manchester, Middle East, Saudi Arabia — ja @ 8:47 pm

According to the Travel Trade Gazette, the Greek charter airline Hellenic Imperial Airways is in discussion with Birmingham Airport about starting flights from the West Midlands to Athens, with onward connections to Jeddah in Saudi Arabia.

These flights would be the airline’s first foray into the scheduled market, and will be operated using Boeing 747 — 200 aircraft. Prices have been quoted at £199 plus unspecified taxes for Athens flights, and £350 plus taxes for return flights to Jeddah.
Quite frankly, I don’t think this is really something to get that excited about at this stage. I’m also sceptical about the proposed choice of aircraft for this route.

Flights are touted as operating to Athens up to 4 times each week, with a continuation on to Jeddah twice each week. I can’t think of any flights from Birmingham to European destinations which operate with anything other than narrowbodied aircraft (up to a maximum size of a Boeing 757 or Airbus A321), so filling a Boeing 747 on this route strikes me as a highly ambitious project. Granted, there has to be reasonable demand for direct flights from Birmingham to Athens, but I’m sure that the other airlines based at Birmingham, in addition to the Greek national airline Olympic, who by comparison operate a similar frequency of flights from Manchester to Athens using Boeing 737 aircraft, will have already looked at this.

I would imagine that one of Flybe’s Embraer E195 jets would be far more suitable for this route, and considerably more economic in terms of fuel usage. However, there are several other major European capitals which aren’t yet served from Birmingham — Berlin and Madrid being the obvious two, and I’m sure that however obvious Athens might seem as both a destination in its own right and as a connecting point for other destinations in Greece and beyond, Flybe’s bean counters have done their sums.

In terms of pricing, I’ve taken a quick look at flights to Athens from Birmingham in mid-October, and found availability for just under £170 with Swiss via Zürich. For a new route to work within Europe, I would expect it to come on stream at a much lower price than a compatible connecting flight, especially as we’re talking about a totally unknown airline here, using very old aircraft.

As for flights to Jeddah, the biggest demand here is during the annual Haj season, and this must surely be best met with ad hoc charter services, rather than year-round flights? Granted, Saudi Arabia is a growth market, and flights to both Jeddah and Riyadh from London can be prohibitively expensive, but there must be many more destinations in the Middle East and Asia which are a higher priority to get served from Birmingham.

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March 30, 2009

Are British Airways always more expensive when they are the only airline offering direct flights?

In our news section, we’ve just looked at long haul routes where British Airways is the only airline offering non-stop point-to-point service.

The expectation might be that they would be able to get away with charging a premium for providing such a service - this has always been the way with the traditional airlines. However farcical it might sound, the logic has always been that the punter should be charged more for the direct routing, even though it costs the airlines much less to service such a route.

The article looked at flights to 10 different destinations across Africa, the Americas and Asia. Generally, the rule does still apply - regardless of the cost to the airline, consumers are prepared to pay more for the convenience of a direct routing, and the market is still driven by what the consumer is prepared to pay, rather than what it costs the airline to provide the service.

Infact, the main exceptions to the rule were where you might expect them - on flights to Bermuda, where British Airways were 18% cheaper than the nearest alternative, the non-direct routing would mean taking flights to New York, and then doubling back again to Bermuda - a route which hardly makes any sense at all, considering that Zoom Airlines used to offer flights from Gatwick to New York via Bermuda.

BA were also cheaper on flights to St Kitts and flights to Providenciales in the Turks and Caicos Islands - again, these were niche destinations where the alternative option would have been an unwieldy flight via the USA. However, BA weren’t always cheaper when it came to Caribbean flights where they were the sole direct provider - on flights to the Cayman Islands, it was cheaper to slug it via New York with Continental. Meanwhile, for flights to Trinidad (Port of Spain), BA were effectively competing against themselves, as the cheaper option was to fly with BA to neighbouring Tobago, and then take a short hop from there with Caribbean Airlines. However, the competition here is simply down to the fact that flights to Tobago are also available from airlines like Virgin and Monarch - therefore BA have to be competitive on that sector, making them competitive on the whole route through to Trinidad, providing you take the hop via Tobago.

On all the other routes we looked at, BA were still able to charge a premium for providing the non-stop service. In many cases, the difference was only a few percent, but when it came to flights to Entebbe / Kampala, the difference rose to 41% over the alternative of flying with KLM and Kenya Airways via Amsterdam. We can only assume that this is down as much to the perceived differences in service between British Aiways and their African rivals as much as it is down to the fact that BA serve the route non-stop.

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