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?
Following on from yesterday’s news that Lufthansa can’t find a suitable buyer for bmi, we’ve had confirmation today that jobs are going to be axed, and that routes will be curtailed at Birmingham, Manchester and Cardiff.
So, is it wise for bmibaby to concentrate their efforts on one large base at East Midlands airports. They say that they want to concentrate on ‘growth routes’, but with growth comes competition, and Ryanair are already very well established at Castle Donnington. Right now, can bmibaby really push themselves as the ones who offer a ‘more pleasant’ experience over Ryanair’s cut-throat service, or will customers continue to vote with their wallets and choose the airline which gives them the cheapest fees? When going after business passengers, it is much easier to play on offering services which take people closer to where they want to go, but is this so important for the leisure passenger – especially when East Midlands airport itself is playing a hybrid game of serving the three cities of Nottingham, Leicester and Derby, and also trying to poach passengers from Birmingham, without being directly adjacent to any of these cities.
Easyjet might be out of the way at East Midlands, but there will have been obvious reasons why they made a commercial decision to pull out. Baby reducing their presence at Manchester leaves room for Jet 2 or Easyjet to add more services, whereas Ryanair and Flybe will swoon over any signs of weakness at Birmingham, and leave tiny with very little opportunity to come back in once the economy starts growing again. As for Cardiff? Not exactly Ryanair’s favourite airport a few years ago, but if baby reduce their presence there, Cardiff airport operators will have many more reasons to do a deal with Ryanair.
This scenario could easily see bmibaby exposed as a one-airport operator within a few months, with very few other places to go to. It would then be only a matter of time before Ryanair came in and made a pincer movement to finally kill off baby for good.
According to today’s Times, in February the number of British tourists heading to the Spanish Costas was down almost 1/4, compared to the same month last year. Should this mean greater availability of cheap flights to Spain as airlines struggle to fill seats?
For the time being, that doesn’t seem to be the case, at least not with Ryanair. Scan through any of their lists of special offer flight prices (today’s cheap flights are £5 inclusive of all compulsory taxes and charges), and you will see that once you get to Alicante flights, the price rises to at least £27. Some special offers are available to Girona and Reus, but flights to destinations such as Malaga, Murcia, Palma and Tenerife are all in the expensive bracket.
Meanwhile, on the plus side, easyJet has announced that it will increase frequencies on its flights from Manchester to Alicante, Malaga and Tenerife. The best prices we found on easyJet’s flights from Manchester to Malaga in April were £66 return — not quite the bargain basement that Ryanair offer to some other destinations, but still very reasonable.
By comparison, Bmibaby have cheap flights to Malaga from Cardiff for £70 return in mid-April (16th to 23rd).
If ever there was a clear-cut argument in favour of Heathrow third runway, then it would be the fact that BMI have just scrapped their flights from Leeds Bradford and Durham Tees Valley to Heathrow. Anyone looking to transfer onto other flights will now have no option but to travel to Amsterdam with KLM instead, as neither of these airports offer hub feeder flights from any other airline.
Proponents of Heathrow’s third runway argue that the extra capacity that would be created could be used to keep open domestic routes like these two, and also to connect other British cities with Heathrow which have lost their links due to the high taxes imposed on UK domestic flights. Obvious cities which might otherwise support flights into Heathrow would include Liverpool and Inverness in the north and Plymouth and Newquay in the southwest. Meanwhile, opponents argue that people should travel to Heathrow by rail, and that the overall number of flights should be reduced anyway, thus reducing the prospect of these routes from ever becoming viable again.
Right now, the facts would appear to speak for themselves when it comes to connecting flights, but what about people who just want point-to-point travel between British regional cities and London? We would expect some passengers from Leeds Bradford and Durham to transfer to flights from Manchester and Newcastle respectively, but a far more significant number will travel by train. Both airports also talked about finding replacement airlines to open up new routes into London, but we heard the same rhetoric when VLM scrapped their Liverpool to London City flights. Perhaps Flybe could come onto the scene at Leeds Bradford, where they already have a presence, but I don’t see them operating Gatwick to Durham Tees Valley flights alongside their existing Gatwick to Newcastle route.
When it comes to the economic arguments about losing jobs to Amsterdam, there is nothing new here. For many years, KLM have offered more feeder flights from UK regional airports than any other airline, and they are set to increase this further still when they open up their new Liverpool to Amsterdam flights at the end of this month. Naturally, this isn’t good news for the UK economy, but we shouldn’t forget that Heathrow’s third runway would come with considerable economic and environmental costs as well. Nor should we forget that the ‘hub and spoke’ model is an inefficient way of operating flights, even if there is always going to be a need for it on some routes.