Tag Archives: twitter

The shocking lack of European capitals served by flights from Birmingham

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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:

  • * Amsterdam is nominal capital and most important commercial city in the Netherlands. Seat of government is in The Hague.
  • Zurich is both commercial capital of Switzerland and main gateway airport to Bern.
  • Istanbul is largest commercial city in Turkey.

Blogger changes airlines cycle carriage policy

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As a keen cyclist and travel website owner (turning into frequent blogger card holder too), I was interested to read this CNN article suggested to me by Travelrants (via Twitter) about how customer Carl Larson blogged on the Bike Transportation Alliance website about being charged $50 to carry his foldable bike on the U.S. carrier Jet Blue, and then managed to get them to change their policy and refund his money after his blog post was picked up by another cycling blog – bikeportland. His post then made its way to a site called The Consumerist, which incidentally I was on earlier on today when I was looking up the Times article about reasons not to fly Ryanair (in order to reply with 20 reasons why you should fly with Ryanair.

Now speaking of airlines and blogging, we know that Ryanair have made an outburst about ‘lunatic bloggers‘, but Ryanair have always thrived on being antagonistic towards anyone who can get them a headline or two, so their strategy is going to buck the trend a little. Jetblue seem to have a commercial model which is much more similar to Easyjet, so it will be interesting to see how stories evolve about The Big Orange and other low cost carriers responding to blogs.

Meanwhile, I think that my own two nightmares with carrying bikes on plans pre-dated the social media revolution. My first was on a Thomsonfly flight to Malaga from Coventry in February 2006, where the wheel got dented, I think because it was put on the standard luggage reclaim belt at Malaga airport. It wouldn’t have been worth pursuing the airline for the cost of one wheel, and fortunately my hotel was just 100 yards from a bike shop so I was able to get going again fairly quickly.

After that experience, I got a hard case for bike the next time for a flight to Geneva with Easyjet in Otctober 2006. On the return journey from Basel, the case itself was damaged. What looked like just a missing wheel turned out to be a crack in the outer casing, writing off the whole box. It took 6 weeks for Easyjet to admit liability, and even when they did, they only repeated the phrase (still, I believe used today), that “bikes and aircraft don’t mix”. I knew they wouldn’t cover the bike, and had separate cover for that, and thought things would be sorted when it turned out that my travel insurance, which was one of the features of the American Express Platinum Card, did indeed cover me for the box. But they then argued that I needed a statement from the airline within 48 hours of arrival – something that it wasn’t possible to get in these circumstances. After numerous follow up emails and phone calls, I got a cheque for the full value of the damaged box, but only under the proviso that it “would not set a precedent for future claims.”

By then, I had already lost all faith in American Express’ customer service and cancelled my card. I have not even considered taking my bike on a plane since.

Maybe next time I have a travel related problem with an airline, I will be abke to make a bit more noise, knowing there is a much greater chance of being listened to – unless, as I said in my last article, I happen to be flying at Michael O’Leary’s pleasure!

As we twitter away, Ryanair up the marketing drive

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Following on from last week’s fuss about toilets, lunatic bloggers and observations about them taking adverts for rival airlines, I should add that this week Ryanair have been offering sales where they seem to pick a random number out of a hat (between 2 and 5), and offer flights at that price, including ‘all taxes and charges.’ Is someone in Ryanair towers just rolling a dice to pick the flight price?

They say that 1 million seats are available each time, but if they sold 1 million each day, that would be 365 million per year – about 6 times the actual number of passengers they carry at all price points. Yet I have done a fair bit of checking, and as I said on Monday, there are seats available at these prices – even if you will sometimes have to be extremely flexible in your itinerary to take advantage. I made a booking myself on Sunday night, and opted to take flights out to Bologna, and back from Pisa – but that’s the way I normally book flights anyway, so I’m still happy.

My suspicions are that the majority of people will find one flight at the bargain price, and maybe see another at “0.00 GBP + taxes”, and leave it at that. Or worse, they will take a bargain flight out, and pay upwards of £50 for the return leg, as that’s the best fit they can find for their schedule.

The bottom line is to remember that Ryanair aren’t in the business of selling cheap flights to suit everyone’s diary, and as long as only a small percentage of customers take them up on their very lowest offers (I’d love to know how many, but I doubt they’d tell anyone that), they will still be in a position to make money of all the extras – some hidden, some voluntary, but they all add up unless you make a determined effort not to pay for any of them.