Germanwings to Kyiv
I forecasted this one, however tentatively, back in December! Germanwings will fly from Berlin and Cologne/Bonn to Kyiv beginning in October. Thanks to Air Scoop for the buzz.
I forecasted this one, however tentatively, back in December! Germanwings will fly from Berlin and Cologne/Bonn to Kyiv beginning in October. Thanks to Air Scoop for the buzz.
My friend TJ has been tearing it up with his amazing Vietnam blog, 9000 Hours in Saigon, which is full of advice, analysis, and astute observations.
TJ has begun to turn his attention to low-cost air travel in Vietnam. Check out his posts on Jetstar Pacific's initial announcement of three new domestic routes in Vietnam, his suspicions that Qantas Group woes might affect Jetstar's expansion plans, and a look at Jetstar's route axeings.
With these posts, TJ helps fill out the budget airline picture beyond Europe and North America. I look forward to his future probes into Asia's low-cost air transportation scene.
Preparing to be away from home for 15 weeks, it turns out, requires the completion of many tasks. Thus, the reduced posting pace of late.
Over the past week I've had the happy fortune to snack on an entire box of Havanna alfajores, brought back from Buenos Aires by my sister. I've had alfajores in the past, but honestly they just didn't thrill me. These Havanna confections, however, are a different story altogether. They were exquisitely delicious, and I loved their presentation, in a bright beautiful yellow box of individually-wrapped alfajores. I'll leave it to others to parse the magic of the alfajor. I'll just say that the approximations found in Manhattan pastry cases aren't even in the same ballpark as these babies.
Also from Argentina via Marisa: current issues of Pronto and Paparazzi. I admire the full narratives on the cover of Pronto, a magazine that does not believe in the gentle tease. Paparazzi trumpets "¡El Embarazo Del Año!" on their cover, claiming that the pregnancy of the year belongs to Argentine actress Dolores Fonzi, the girlfriend of Gael Garcia Bernal. In actuality, it appears that the two haven't even acknowledged being in a relationship. Also, her pregnancy doesn't officially exist. Great cover, though.
What else? I'm glad that I bought my June London-Isle of Man air ticket from Flybe rather than Euromanx, as the latter has gone belly-up.
With the continuing stream of bad aviation industry news, you could be forgiven for imagining that Europe's low-cost carriers are all in crisis. In fact, this is not quite the case. To wit: April's performance stats for Ryanair, Air Berlin, and SkyEurope.
Ryanair's load factor fell 4 percent in April against last April 2007's numbers, from 83 percent to 79 percent, while their passenger numbers rose 15 percent, up to 4.72 million passengers. In offering an explanation for the former stat, Ryanair's press release notes that Easter occurred in March this year, thereby explaining last April's high load factor and, by extension, this April's 4 percent load factor decline. One understands why the airline failed to mention the positive effects of an Easter bump in their March 2008 statistical round-up.
Air Berlin had universally sunny numbers in April, with a 4.5 percent load factor increase (from 74.3 to 78.8 percent) and a 6.5 percent jump in passengers, to 2.24 million. Air Berlin's stats include passengers served on some other airlines, all part of the Air Berlin Group: Belair, LTU, and Luftfahrtgesellschaft Walter.
On its surface, SkyEurope's April performance appears to be the worst of the three. The airline's load factor fell from 82.1 percent to 70.7 percent, while the the number of passengers flown declined 4.7 percent, to 280,000. Note that SkyEurope's press release title erroneously trumpets last April's passenger numbers. Odd. These numbers don't look good. I'm hoping that the changes made by the airline over the last many months will improve their future stats.
Back at the end of December, I predicted that 2008 would see further low-cost carrier expansion in Eastern Europe, with more routes into Romania and Bulgaria and the tentative development of routes into Ukraine and Moldova. I thought that we might see SkyEurope and even Ryanair beginning some routes to Kyiv by the end of the year.
But the first serious move comes from Hungarian Wizz Air, who will be launching seven Ukrainian domestic routes in July. Wizz Air's Ukraine hub will be Kyiv; they'll fly between the capital and L'viv, Kharkiv, Odessa, Simferopol, and Zaporizhia, and will also fly routes between Simferopol and both L'viv and Kharkiv. Details are here. The airline is not running any international routes in or out of Ukraine.
I know I've been blogging a lot about budget airlines lately. This is mostly due to the fact that the previous month's airline stats have just been released. Budget airlines are also on my mind because, in gearing up for my extended stay in London, I've just booked a bunch of tickets on European LCCs. And also because EuroCheapo just launched a new budget air section, no doubt.
All of which brings me, circuitously, to news of Air Berlin's March performance. The airline did quite well this past month, with a modest 5.5 percent improvement in passenger numbers (accounting for over 2,175,000 passengers) against last March's figures. Air Berlin managed a 4 percent rise in load factor in March in comparison to last March, filling 77.8 percent of its seats.
Air Berlin trailed Ryanair by about a percentage point on March load factor (77.8 percent to 79 percent), while they lead SkyEurope by over four percentage points (77.8 percent to 73.6 percent).
It will be interesting to see how the summer season and various sales, like Ryanair's near-constant state of sale, will affect load factor over the next few months.
1. According to Amy Verner in the Globe and Mail, flying Porter between Toronto City Centre and Newark really is far superior to flying from Pearson or Buffalo to NYC. No surprise there. It's just that C$361.41 (US$357.34 as of this moment) seems like a lot of money to me for a short jaunt. I know that Porter isn't a low-cost carrier, but I can fly on JetBlue to Chicago roundtrip for about half that amount. Am I being unreasonable? Shoestring allegiances aside, Verner's article did nothing to quell my personal Portermania.
2. Another note on Skybus. When the airline got compared to Ryanair, I would find myself feeing itchy. Ryanair exploits secondary airports near big, highly-trafficked cities as their bases. Yes, there's often a hassle involved with getting between these airports and the cities they represent, but for the most part the distances are reasonable. London Stansted, for example, is a doable 45 minutes from London by train. Skybus chose Columbus, not New York, San Francisco, or Los Angeles as its base. I wonder how things would have played out if their primary base had been Islip or the Sonoma County Airport or Long Beach. Possibly not that much better; after all, this is a tough time to launch an airline.
3. Mark Smith, also known as the Man in Seat Sixty-One, has put together a truly fab list of reasonable rail alternatives to luxury train itineraries for the Guardian.
How did I miss this? The Skybus business model struck me as likely to fail but I found the inclusion of all sorts of underserved airports on their route map exciting. There's a great analysis of the situation at Airline Bulletin.
Meanwhile, I noticed earlier this week that Clickair is selling Barcelona-Tel Aviv fares. I thought that Ryanair would be the first European low-cost carrier to fly to Tel Aviv, but it turns out that Clickair has beaten them to the punch. The fares themselves aren't dirt cheap—in a quick search, the best roundtrip fare I found runs €239. Still, this is an interesting development, particularly in a week in which Clickair, the airline in question, is pursuing a merger with Vueling.
SkyEurope's March was an odd one. The airline experienced a 16.2 percent rise in the number of passengers flown in March, against last March's performance, carrying over 307,000 passengers over the course of the month. Load factor is down over 14 percent to 73.6 percent in comparison with March 2007, a fact that the airline attributes to a dramatic, nearly 40 percent rise in "seat capacity."
Against Ryanair's performance, SkyEurope lagged on both criteria this past month, with a lower rise in the number of passengers flown (16.2 percent to Ryanair's 19 percent), and lower load factor (73.6 percent to Ryanair's 79 percent).
The European low-cost airline industry just seems to burrow deeper and deeper into trouble on a daily basis. There are almost daily portents of worse times ahead. Air Berlin just lowered profit expectations for 2008. Clickair and Vueling are in merger talks. Centralwings has cut tons of flghts. Ryanair is closing a call center and freezing senior management pay.
With all that in the background, Ryanair's March performance was pretty impressive. The airline posts a 19 percent jump in passengers in March 2008 against March 2007, from 3.77 to 4.48 million. Its load factor (to review: "the number of passengers as a proportion of the number of seats available for passengers") rises one percent, from 78 to 79 percent.
I'll look forward to tossing these numbers around in comparison with other LCC stats tomorrow or next week.
Thanks as always to Air Scoop for the top-notch European budget airline news digest.
