Cardiff airport

It's good news. I don't care if they are old routes coming back or not, it's better than no new flights being announced.

As Ash said, it's a step in the right direction. Let's hope people use them.

it is good news but as Kyle says its all about bums on seats. if we don't support these services then we can't complain if they get pulled. I for one am certainly looking at Milan and Munchen, lets hope the WTB are putting lots of adverts in these 8 cities advertising Wales is now open to tourism

The link below is the follow up piece from WalesOnline today. It's a new low for them with a typo in the first word, no full stop at the end and a story so riddled with editing errors it is a bit tricky to follow at times. Do they proof read anything?! Sion Barry must be more than a little cross with the end product...

http://www.walesonline.co.uk/business/b ... on-8774079

Nothing to do with Cardiff Airport but I just love this picture.



Hang on, yes it does have something to do with Cardiff Airport.

This is the new timetable -

http://www.flybe.com/timetableClassic/t ... elDest=XXX

Erm. Thanks for that link Karl.

This is exactly the kind of higgledy piggledy kind of crap that I feared - and knew would be the reality.

If you want to fly to Geneva (one of the 11 routes in the announcement) then you'd better want to go there before 11th April and fly on a Saturday and stay an entire week lol

Geneva
BE1833 11:40 14:55 . . . . . Sa . - - 07-Mar-15 - 11-Apr-15

There is much more flexibility for flying to Munich - you've got a whole seven week window of opportunity - from 1st Sep to 23rd Oct 2015.

There is much more flexibility for flying to Munich - you've got a whole seven week window of opportunity - from 1st Sep to 23rd Oct 2015.

If you look at FlyBE routes from other airports it appears that no timetables have been published from October onwards. I would assume that they publish timetables around eight months in advance - that's pretty standard practice for short-haul.

As for frequencies - what did you expect? Do you really think it would make any sense for an airline to use their aircraft on multiple services to a couple of destinations rather than testing demand on a variety of routes?

They're offering a pretty good regular services to established destinations - Dublin, Paris etc and useful, if limited, services to a few other places. It isn't transformative - but a two plane service was what BMIBaby used to offer from Rhoose. The main difference is that BMIBaby seemed to concentrate more on bucket and spade destinations while FlyBe seem to prefer cities.

I do understand you have something of a personal downer about Cardiff Airport and a desire to spruke Bristol but you're pushing your luck pretending the FlyBE announcement is anything other than good news.

@Ash

I just think Wizard is saying the devil is in the detail. Whilst it is certainly good news that we get routes to Munich, Dusseldorf, it isn't so good that you have to stay a week when you get there. The city break market needs flights twice a week if not three otherwise your market becomes limited.

From a "business traveller" perspective, the timings of the flights doesn't look great to me.

I fly a few times a year for work (seemingly all in late March this year... Scotland, Belfast, then back to Scotland in the space of 5 days.. urgh!), and look for flights that are:
- around 7PM or later for intra-UK, or 5:30PM or later for intra-Europe, so I can work almost a full day before having to go to the airport
- Or, if in the morning, land before 9:30AM wherever I'm going, so I can be ready for meetings 11:00 AM onwards.

Only the Dublin and Edinburgh routes seem to tick those boxes (allowing a round trip in a day, for instance). The others like Milan, Munich and Dusseldorf, which could be business desinations, have flights in late morning or early afternoon, which is rubbish for business travelers!

I worry about some of these routes. The cynic in me wonders if flybe agreed to some routes that it doesn't think will be very profitable but the WG really wants. Flybe pockets the subsidy, and has ensured the routes will be a failure by the timings. And then can either pull out or reassign routes to more profitable "bucket and spade" routes.

Its a sad day when you are in Milan (for example) and you need to rush back to the office. Far better to stay a day or two either side, get to know more of the way of life, realise it is more than sitting in a piazza drinking an espresso - though that is pretty brilliant!

If people use it, feedback & it makes money I am sure Flybe will listen and amend. FWIW I think Milan is there to cater for holidays to the lakes in addition to the elongated city break.