Aer Lingus Heathrow flights take off today, to a slow start
14.01.08
Irish flag carrier Aer Lingus has sold an average of just over one third of the seats on its controversial new Belfast International Airport to Heathrow route for the first month of its operation, the Sunday Business Post reports. The service begins today, after the Shannon - Heathrow route ended yesterday after almost 60 years.
The airline announced last August that it would scrap its Shannon - Heathrow route in order to use its slots at the London airport for a shuttle service to its new hub at Belfast International. Planes will fly on the route three times a day each way from today, increasing to four times a day from March.
However, according to the Irish newspaper, although total of 32,364 seats are available on the route for the first month, an average load factor of just 35 percent means only 11,327 of these flights have been sold to date. Many return flights from Heathrow to Belfast for the first month of service cost £1, and £1 fares can also be booked from Belfast to Heathrow during the period.
The low fares plus a 35 percent load factor compare with an average load factor of almost 80 percent - and €80 one-way flights - on the axed Shannon - Heathrow route, the newspaper reports.
The new service restores the link between Belfast International and Heathrow for the first time since October 2001, when British Airways pulled out. It will be operated as a code share with BA, but it will compete with Ryanair's Belfast City to Stansted flights, Cityjet's Belfast City to London City Airport route and bmi's 8 flights a day Belfast City to Heathrow service. It will also face competition from easyJet, which flies from Belfast International to Stansted, Gatwick and Luton, and from Flybe, which operates from Belfast City to Gatwick.
Heathrow is the fourth of nine new routes announced at by Aer Lingus for Belfast International since the airline decided to set up its new UK hub there. Amsterdam, Barcelona and Geneva are already up and running, while Rome, Budapest, Malaga and Faro start on February 25, and Nice on April 1.
However, the newspaper also reports that passenger figures on the Irish airline's flights from Belfast to Amsterdam - which started on December 10 - are poor. It says that the majority of return flights from Amsterdam currently cost just £2.
But Aer Lingus corporate affairs director, Enda Corneille, said the airline was 'delighted' with bookings on the Belfast - Heathrow route, and that people booked 'very late' on this route and the Amsterdam route.'
An Aer Lingus spokesman told The Sunday Business Post that passengers travelling to Heathrow usually booked 'two to three weeks in advance. And these flights do not cost £1 or £2 - as they are booked, they increase in price.'
He said: 'We don't comment on load factors for individual routes. Flights [from Belfast] after Easter to Faro, Malaga, Barcelona and Budapest are booking very well, and in most cases, quicker than from our bases in the Republic. We plan to sell half a million seats in our first full year of operation from Belfast, from the 700,000 available.'
An industry source told the newspaper that an average load factor of 35 percent would have to at least double for the Heathrow service to be commercially viable.
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