NCL

[Clive]

SeanM on twitter reports Eurowings have announced 2x weekly NCL-BER.

VisitBritain stats show that Newcastle has a fraction of the number of German visitors that Glasgow has, yet NCL now has more German destinations than GLA.

A number of positive announcements, including city routes, at NCL- an airport that is surely a close peer to GLA, albeit serving a city with far less inbound foreign tourism demand.

Let’s be realistic. NCL would love to have the airline business that GLA has.

[Iain]

SeanM on twitter reports Eurowings have announced 2x weekly NCL-BER.

VisitBritain stats show that Newcastle has a fraction of the number of German visitors that Glasgow has, yet NCL now has more German destinations than GLA.

A number of positive announcements, including city routes, at NCL- an airport that is surely a close peer to GLA, albeit serving a city with far less inbound foreign tourism demand.

Let’s be realistic. NCL would love to have the airline business that GLA has.

Would they though? 5+ years ago when GLA had UA, DL, VS etc then I'd agree, but not so much now.

They've got less EZY, but a lot more FR, including routes like BGY that GLA would like I'm sure. EK are daily just like GLA. They have LH FRA, but also EW, which we don't. They also have AF to CDG, we don't.

Or looking at it another way, GLA has 16 int departures today, NCL has 20. Yesterday was 23 v 22. It hardly seems like GLA is miles ahead.

The main difference is less domestic traffic, particularly to London, because they're further south and the train to Central London only takes 3hrs.

I'm sure they'd like FI and TS, but Id be surprised if GLA is turning NCL management green with envy.

[egpffqtv]

SeanM on twitter reports Eurowings have announced 2x weekly NCL-BER.

VisitBritain stats show that Newcastle has a fraction of the number of German visitors that Glasgow has, yet NCL now has more German destinations than GLA.

A number of positive announcements, including city routes, at NCL- an airport that is surely a close peer to GLA, albeit serving a city with far less inbound foreign tourism demand.

Let’s be realistic. NCL would love to have the airline business that GLA has.

I don’t have the time to check for myself, but do you know how many airline customers each of the airports have?

IIRC GLA only has 12 - although I could be, and am happy to be proved wrong. Like I say, no time to check for myself at the moment.

[FlyGLA]

According to Wikipedia, both GLA and NCL have 16 airlines. NCL has 3 airlines that do not serve GLA; Air France, Aegean and Eurowings. GLA has 3 airlines that do not serve NCL; Air Transat, Icelandair and Wizz Air.

It seems that, without counting, NCL now serves more international destinations than GLA. Unbelievable, if true.

Being realistic, I don't think management at NCL would swap their route and airline portfolio with GLA. 5 years ago, yes. Now, definitely not.

[Clive]

According to Wikipedia, both GLA and NCL have 16 airlines. NCL has 3 airlines that do not serve GLA; Air France, Aegean and Eurowings. GLA has 3 airlines that do not serve NCL; Air Transat, Icelandair and Wizz Air.

It seems that, without counting, NCL now serves more international destinations than GLA. Unbelievable, if true.

Being realistic, I don't think management at NCL would swap their route and airline portfolio with GLA. 5 years ago, yes. Now, definitely not.

Why? GLA’s is bigger by any measure.

According to FR24 GLA has 55 routes and serves 23 countries while NCL has 37 routes serving 21 countries.

[Iain]

Eurowings certainly see some value in the North East as DUS has been going for some time now too, I always thought it could be due to Army presence in the area. Perhaps it also serves the inbound market for Germans visiting Peak/Lake District.

Perhaps, although MAN is surely closer to the peak district and parts of the lake district (with direct trains too) - and given EW would appear to believe ve they can serve the whole of Scotland through EDI, you might have thought they'd think the same wrt existing DUS services at MAN.

Has UK army presence in Germany not been substantially reduced?

It's a shame GLA hasn't snt been able to regain DUS service. LM were never the right fit and I have have a very vague memory when EW stopped there was some suggestion from someone in the know that it was for an odd reason.

[GKirk]

It's probably not fair to compare GLA and NCL. GLA has a much larger catchment area and as FlyGLA usually points outs, the NE England isn't the most prosperous region. That being said, it has a very proactive management team with a strong marketing team.

The route potentially should do well, but Berlin is like a YoYo destination from NCL.

[egpffqtv]

Eurowings certainly see some value in the North East as DUS has been going for some time now too, I always thought it could be due to Army presence in the area. Perhaps it also serves the inbound market for Germans visiting Peak/Lake District.

Perhaps, although MAN is surely closer to the peak district and parts of the lake district (with direct trains too) - and given EW would appear to believe ve they can serve the whole of Scotland through EDI, you might have thought they'd think the same wrt existing DUS services at MAN.

Has UK army presence in Germany not been substantially reduced?

It's a shame GLA hasn't snt been able to regain DUS service. LM were never the right fit and I have have a very vague memory when EW stopped there was some suggestion from someone in the know that it was for an odd reason.

I know that when EW moved the DUS service from EDI to GLA for the brief period that they were here, the airline (or maybe it was the airport, I can’t recall), said that there were more G postcodes booking on the EDI flight so it made more sense to move the service to GLA. I personally never bought into that, because, when was the last time you disclosed your full address to an airline when making a booking? I also never bought into that, as a lot of travellers, especially corporate, don’t necessarily pay for their own flights, their company does, and the company address is more likely to be associated to a booking as opposed to the traveller’s address.

I don’t know what the suggestion was though for the service moving back to EDI.

If I were to hazard a guess, it could possibly be because EDI host all LH Group airlines and they probably have better handling agent provision over there?

[egpffqtv]

When DUS-GLA started it was still being operated by Lufthansa on the CRJ, presumably targeting business pax more than leisure. When DUS-EDI was launched it was with EW on the A320. I suspect the target markets were very different and the Eurowings takeover changed that.

I do recall EW announced SZG-GLA a few years ago but it didn't actually launch.

Yes, DUS-GLA was with LH CRJ but that changed to EW A320 and when that was lost, LM and one of their jungle jets stepped in

[Iain]

When DUS-GLA started it was still being operated by Lufthansa on the CRJ, presumably targeting business pax more than leisure. When DUS-EDI was launched it was with EW on the A320. I suspect the target markets were very different and the Eurowings takeover changed that.

I do recall EW announced SZG-GLA a few years ago but it didn't actually launch.

Yes, DUS-GLA was with LH CRJ but that changed to EW A320 and when that was lost, LM and one of their jungle jets stepped in

I have a vague memory as well that just before it stopped it was also operated by a Dash-8. Indeed there was maybe some discussion about Eurowings having a shortage of Dash-8s to continue operating the route.

LM just wasn't the right airline for it and I think they generally found Germany unprofitable - I think they also dropped EDI-HAJ.

If you look at the pattern of pax numbers I think it appears that when LH started FRA (and at the time MUC too) it probably took a significant amount of connecting pax off the DUS route that had been connecting over that airport but then switched to FRA and MUC, which are more set up for connections.

Nevertheless the historic numbers would seem to suggest there should be at least some market for 2 or 3 flights per week in summer. I guess slots at DUS, plus no FR - and virtually no EZY - at DUS also kind of limits things.

Just to pivot back to BER, it's interesting looking back in the figures to see that in Jul 2018 there were 17k passengers on GLA-SXF, and this Jul there were 3k. I guess more than 80% of the Passengers on these flights were actually traveling to Edinburgh.....