Tag Archives: KLM

When flights to hub airports are still cheaper if you go indirect

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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:

  • *Continental dates were 2nd-9th December. No direct Continental flights found in March 2012.
  • AF = Air France, DL = Delta
  • AMS = Amsterdam, CDG = Paris CDG, ZRH = Zurich

As BMI scrap flights, is Heathrow’s loss just Amsterdam’s gain?

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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.