Spendthrift Shoestring

Air Berlin's Good March

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.

Monday List: Porter, Skybus, Cheap Trains

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.

Skybus, R.I.P., Plus Tel Aviv on Clickair

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: Disjointed March Stats

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).

Ryanair: Not Too Shabby

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.

EuroCheapo's New Budget Flights Search Engine!

It's ambitious and bold and it looks good, too.

EuroCheapo has launched a brand new low-cost carrier search engine called CheapoSearch Flights. It's a massive tower of information power, with the low-down on Europe's budget airlines, a route finder, airport mapping, a set of useful articles, and an actual flight search engine.

(I should acknowledge that I spent many weeks this past fall researching and writing material for the guide, so my excitement in seeing the flight content launch isn't abstract.)

Bravo, EuroCheapo!

Two Questions, One Statement

1. Is it just me or does Ryanair appear to be in constant sale mode? Last weekend I eyed the airline's midnight Monday deadline for "free" flights, then watched as the airline hawked a fare sale ending midnight Thursday. Now we've got another free fare sale to contend with, this one finishing up on Monday at midnight.

2. Is it just me or is Alphabeat the best band ever? The Danish seven-member band are rocking the UK right now with their song "Fascination," which reminds me of the Go-Gos, or of what might have happened in 1984 if a bunch of Brits had tried to merge the Go-Gos' California vibe with some synthesizer action. I like "Boyfriend," another of Alphabeat's songs, even more than their current UK single.

3. I'll be on a true holiday this Sunday through next, in Trinidad and Grenada, though I am hoping that a publication or two will emerge from the jaunt. I will make a sincere effort to crank a few blog posts out next week but I might just be too relaxed to force myself to sit in front of a screen before returning home.

Extras

When we travel, we get used to the standard treatment, whatever it is. An extra or a perk is any service or good that departs from the norm. The problem here is that once we get used to the extra at hand it no longer seems like an extra. Those little "Snooze Kits" that JetBlue hands out are a perfect example. After a few cross-country jaunts you begin to expect them and they no longer seem like a perk. In fact, they seem like a wasteful extravagance. If you're like me, you're just going to try to do a little work, drink selzer to stay hydrated, and flip between the Live Map and noxious political talk shows all night, anyway, so you don't really need the kit.

But that first time they're extra special.

Here's another example of a very appealing perk. Last month on a very brief morning flight between Martinique and Guadeloupe on Air Caraïbes, flight attendants handed out croissants wrapped in napkins. The croissants weren't very good, but I didn't really care. It was such an unexpected act with such local significance, and I was starving and needed to fill my stomach.

And another. Last summer I took a 5 a.m. express bus from Skopje to Belgrade. Once we crossed into Serbia the bus attendant made her way through the bus and handed out buttered pieces of bread and orange drinks. A little snack was the last thing I expected, and it was fully appreciated. Plus a dubbed version of Are We There Yet? played. Until you've seen Ice Cube and Nia Long banter in Serbian, you haven't lived.

SkyEurope's February

In comparison to Ryanair's performance in February, SkyEurope this past month saw greater increases in passengers numbers and greater declines in load factor. All in all, it was a very dramatic month for the Slovak low-cost carrier. SkyEurope managed a very impressive 25.5 percent spike in passengers in February 2008 against February 2007 stats. Less impressive—in fact, mind-dizzyingly so—was their load factor drop of 18.1 percent, from last February's very strong 85.3 percent to this February's tepid 67.2 percent.

The airline attributes this free-fall of a drop to a huge increase in seat capacity and "a focus on continuous yield growth." Fair enough, though these are hardly the sorts of goals that axiomatically trigger load factor decline.

I'm not shy about the fact that I'm a fan of SkyEurope. I hope that these numbers don't scare investors and analysts. I'm crossing my fingers that the airline will continue to hone its product and deepen its route map to include more underserved airports in Central and Eastern Europe. Profitably, of course.

Ryanair's Mixed Numbers & Proofreading Difficulties

Ryanair just announced their February performance numbers. The airline claims a 20 percent rise in passenger numbers in February 2008 against February 2007 numbers, and a two percent drop in load factor in February against last February's stats. Load factor, or the number of passengers as a proportion of the number of seats available to passengers, was at 75 percent in February.

Last year at this time Ryanair posted a passenger increase of 24 percent and a load factor decrease of one percent, both against February 2006 numbers. If anything, there's a slight downward drift here, though nothing approaching a dramatic trend.

I hate to venture into snarky territory, but Ryanair could really stand to proofread a bit more diligently. It's February, not Frebruary.

As soon as some other European low-cost carriers publish their February 2008 numbers, I'll write about them.