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Home >> Forum >> EI and FR go head to head at ORK Civil aviation forum
EI and FR go head to head at ORK
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Message of captain bill - Sent 05 Feb 11:49 |
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Aer Lingus announced that with the A-320s it is withdrawing from LGW it will expand its routes out of ORK this summer. This will coinside with the joint venture of EI and RE.
EI announced that it would be flying to places such as ACE, ALC, APG, BCN, FAO, LIS, and others opening up destination to the people of Cork that in the past they had to make a trip to Dublin to commence.
Well our much talked about good friend Mr. O'Learie is not going to stand for that so he is also going to introduce flights to the same destinations as EI and has made a promise to the good people of Cork and the surounding area Come fly with Ryanair for we are the cheapest. Notice please he did not say what we all know to be true We are the cheap and nasty airline.
What is going on ? Ireland is a small country with a population of around 4 million and although Cork is the second largest city in Ireland it is in reality a large town with a rural populated surounding area that can't in any way shap or form sustain two airlines flying to the same destinations so one will have to go.
I dont think EI with it's problems can sustain any losses at all is this not the reason they are closing so many routes out of LGW so the question is will they stand and fight and see fares drop to lows that we have never seen before or will one of them pull out. I don't think EI will pull out this year but they will give FR a run for their money remembering that at one time Fr had nothing but bad things to say about ORK airport.
Lukasz you just might get a cheap holiday to the sun this year.
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Message of Mabel - Sent 05 Feb 16:46 |
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I hate to say it, but given EI's financial difficulties this is one battle FR will likely win.
IMHO, EI needs to focus on providing service for business travellers and passengers into major airports and leave the leisure market to secondary/holiday airports to FR and the charters. [Perhaps creating a LCC or charter subsidiary would be a way for EI to go if it absolutely must try to compete with FR.] Most leisure travellers are looking for a bargain, so advantage: FR because FR provides dirt-cheap fares (at least so thinks the average Irish holiday seeker). Most business travellers and pax travelling to major cities won't go near FR because they need to fly right into the city centre, not to some converted military airfield 200km from the city it purports to serve, so advantage: EI. EI stooping down to FR's level by trying to compete for the bargain basement sector is much like if Mercedes were to start building cheap plastic cars to compete with Trabant.
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Message of Lukasz - Sent 05 Feb 18:03 |
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Well, first of all, I have not turned completely Irish yet, so prefer a good walk around... let's say Petra in Jordan, or Khajuraho in India, to a week of pan-frying on Lanzarote :)
EI has been flying to all of those destinations since a long time ago. I think they are adding only TFS this summer. All other 'new' routes are just re-branded RE ones. So EI have a well established customer base. And people going for sun holidays don't mind paying extra 10 or 20 euros. FR said it themselves in their latest results - the sun holiday routes give much better yields than high-frequency city hops.
I think FR is trying to compete more with charter carriers than with EI here. They said in their press release:
Ryanair’s new routes will allow many families in Munster to travel to the sun at low fares from Cork Airport and make up for much of the flights lost as a result of Budget Travel’s recent closure.
Essentially they are doing the same thing as with the gap left by flyglobespan in Scotland.
Most likely result will be that FR and EI will split the market between themselves, reducing any charter traffic to a minimum. EI will roughly break even, and FR will make a ton of money, with their much lower unit costs. It doesn't seem so bad for EI, but of course, they have used the summer high yields to fund massive losses in the winter. So breaking even is really not good enough for them.
What's interesting, none of the FR routes is to the Canaries. And that has been the most popular direction for EI from what I know.
Cork is a dirt hole, unfortunately, (no need for polite descriptions Capt. Bill :), so there is no room for two big airlines. So far FR has been keeping a minimal presence here. We'll see what happens next. I cannot see ORK growing from 3 to 4-5m pax all of the sudden. So one of the airlines will have to scale down. EI's problem is they don't have anywhere to go, if they retreat from Ireland.
Then again, W6 operates 4 and are opening the 5th connection to Poland from ORK. I checked the actual traffic numbers, and 2009 has been better than 2008 on those routes. And the tickets are not cheap - 50-200 euros. Both FR and EI could have taken that market, but they didn't. I always wonder why.
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Message of EI-DUB - Sent 05 Feb 19:00 |
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I don't think a subsidiary is the way to go, they did own a stake in Futura a few years back with limited success. I really think the linkup with Aer Arann will serve them very well, I think the key idea is that the new thinner routes will feed passengers into the larger Aer Lingus network.
Re: the battle with FR I am not sure we will be seeing in the future, the same crazy rock bottom fares we have witnessed in the last few years. They are just not sustainable.
Mabel what you must also take into account is that Aer Lingus is quite close to the Irish public's heart, well most of us anyway, and I am not alone in saying that I will gladly spend more to fly EI than FR. Everytime I have flown recently EI has competed with FR on price. So I would have every hope that this expansion in Cork could work.
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Message of Mabel - Sent 05 Feb 20:09 |
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EI-DUB you're right about EI being the Irish flag carrier and near and dear to the heart of Eire, but lately it hasn't exactly been operating like a flag carrier. The promise of cheap fares is very alluring and FR excels in that area. EI is haemorrhaging money because it has chosen to model its European ops after a LCC rather than the flag carrier it is. For EI to profit it needs to renew its focus on premium and biz travellers and pax who need to fly into a major airport near a city centre and leave the holiday ''stout louts'' flying to Lanzarote on bargain basement fares to FR.
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Message of captain bill - Sent 05 Feb 22:20 |
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I find myself in agreement with all the points you guys have made so far and I have been thinking as I have been reading them just how fortunate Ireland is to have an airline like Aer Lingus. I like so many others worry that they are going too far down the LCC road when I dont think they need to. There is a market as Mabel has said for the business traveler and the passenger that wants a little more than just a seat on an aeroplane and who will pay a little extra to be flown into the city they wish to visit. I like that little bit extra leg room and the service that the flag carrier type airline offer.
We in Scotland don't have a National or Flag airline and our choices are very limited. We can use BA or BMI to transit through LGW or LHR or we can use the limited nettwork provided by Easyjet or again travel to the worst airport in the UK PIK and endure FR.
When we go on holiday within Europe we have to use either Thomson or TomCook and be crammed in like cattle or again the limited services of Easy or Ryan. If we had an airline like EI in Scotland because it would be Scottish and provided the service was as the traveler requires we would use it and I do believe it would be successful.
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Message of Lukasz - Sent 06 Feb 15:03 |
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To be honest, I would be very worried about EI going back to the flag carrier practices. Ireland might be too small for that. If BA, LH, or AF shrink by even 50% under the LCC pressure, they will still be big enough to be viable businesses. Ireland is 20 times smaller than Germany, you know, and I would be worried that EI will have to shrink to the size of CityJet to survive as a legacy airline. 10 A320s, 4 A330s, serving just 10-15 biggest airports in Europe and 2-3 in the USA.
Any middle ground, between a flag and LCC, might not be possible in Ireland, and there is no way a flag carrier can survive with such a small local market.
EI's current CEO seems to want to try a mixed style. There is a good old saying coming from the financial markets: There is no third way . And EI, like any other company, must have an owner, and be a profitable business. Otherwise nobody will care, things will keep deteriorating slowly, and they will eventually go the Alitalia way, when their cash pile disappears.
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Message of SJR - Sent 11 Feb 22:39 |
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To be honest i never quite understood why EI didnt try Edinburgh and try to become the flag carrier for Scotland as well as Ireland. Would certainly have been better than getting into a battle they couldnt possibly win at Gatwick with Easyjet and competing with a well established carrier like BA. That said once BA finally move all movements to LHR i can see Aer Lingus looking at LGW again because i think they could potentially do well then. Especially if they consider using smaller aircraft on saturated routes. At the moment Aer Lingus seem to be trying whatever they can think of to try and turn a profit and as yet its not worked that well. Edinburgh or possibly Glasgow would have been a better place to go because they dont have an established legacy carrier and even Manchester could have worked better. Perhaps if Aer Lingus wants to do well in the leisure market they should consider looking at contracts with holiday companies to boost there loads a bit. The one im mainly thinking of is Kissflights who currently are working with VikingHellas mostly amoung other carriers.
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Message of Mabel - Sent 11 Feb 22:52 |
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Message of Lukasz - Sent 11 Feb 22:58 |
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Err... yes... - EI already have a base at LGW, flying (until March) all around Europe. And FR has plenty of bases in the UK.
Setting a base in Alba could be an interesting option for EI alright. Scottish and Irish natures are quite similar (both have Gaelic origins, after all), so they could be well received.
Who is going to write to Mr. Mueller? (the CEO of EI) :)
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Message of Mabel - Sent 12 Feb 0:11 |
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Message of speedbird9468 - Sent 12 Feb 2:23 |
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what I'd like to see is EI attack FR from regionals. But using different routes but places that are close to FR's routes. For Example instead of DUB go to Belfast. Instead of Carcassone got to Barcelona or something like that.
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Message of captain bill - Sent 12 Feb 8:35 |
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If EI decide to come to Scotland and I have my doubts about that it would need to be GLA as FR are now well established at PIK and EDI. One of the reasons Flyglobespan was so successful in Scotland (until someone misappropriated £128million) was because it was regarded as Scotlands airline. I have now noticed that Easyjet are saying that they are the airline choice of Northern Ireland and Scotland because the offer more services out of these two countries than any other airline. (more European. FlyBE have lots of domestics)
Going back to Northern Ireland whare I am working this week I notice that EIs routes out of BFS apart from LHR are not as well filled as they should be but to the same destinations Easy and Jet 2 are doing well.
I always said LGW was a bad move for EI with EZ already being there and flying to most of the same destinations.
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