Thanks for the insight. I presume that AA and BA would also be selling the Aer Lingus seats in the USA. All 3 carriers are well known to New Yorkers and AA would feed from all over the States.greymare wrote: ↑Wed Jun 29, 2022 8:53 pmThe Orlando/UK market right now is very difficult as there is very few options available to fill back the loss of Tammy Cook capacity. TUI as most people know have come out of the Covid crisis with huge debt, so there strategy like i said above is about making as much profit from the their current fleet as possible. This means not over providing on Orlando and Cancun for example as this will help with yield and drive up profitability on each longhaul asset and they can meet the huge demand in European sunshine spots by flying those very same longhaul aircraft to DLM, PMI and TFS which allows the 787s to do two departures per day rather than one on longhaul routes and again increasing asset profitability.Clive wrote: ↑Wed Jun 29, 2022 7:30 pmSounds like we’ll have had our tea. Unless they chuck it and a different carrier jumps back on GLA-MCO. Aer Lingus for example…..greymare wrote: ↑Wed Jun 29, 2022 6:45 pm Remember the reason for the move was strategic (Delta) with all eggs in one basket, plus the A330 on the Scottish Route was not a great fit with their config compared to the B744. I think they may have felt the A330 into EDI might have attracted more inbound US customers paying a higher yield for their upper product would offset the loss of economy seats from the B744t and therefore it was worth trying EDI. If the new VS model doesn't work at EDI it wont work at GLA. Its also worth noting that a large number of passengers using the route this year were GLA booked before the airport change was announced and large scale cancellations did occur and whether or not that gave them enough time to fill the gaps could be a factor given the cost involved in such holidays are normally approached by most families as a long term project.
Aer Lingus as you say is an obvious choice to consider going forward as is one other UK airline, however the question is will Aer Lingus UK strategy be to continue expanding their network from MAN, growing market share and profitability on their new routes and trying to grab as much of the TCX market or will they look at setting up new routes/stations from airports like GLA or BHX.
Having said all that, I believe that Aer Lingus might not be the best fit for GLA, as the Aer Lingus brand strength might not be strong enough to attract inbound US tourists (I maybe wrong), therefore it may need an airline with a UK tour company behind it to attract the necessary UK departure volume to make the route viable just like TCX. I say this as I look at TUI they are filling these MLB flights but they have a huge UK presence to help fill their aircraft.
A big part of the problem for GLA is there just isn’t a swathe of potential tour operators or airlines who could do Scotland-Orlando. I can only think of Jet2 if they ever decided to take the plunge on UK-US. Not something on their mid-term radar, I wouldn’t think.