Poiu wrote: ↑22 Nov 2019, 21:51
No LCC competition will make intra European travel more expensive and will increase the profit of feeder airlines, there is no benefit for travellers nor for airports. If Austrian halts their NRT service, locals who need to fly from Vienna to Tokyo will fly via Fra, LHR, Cdg,.. but they will still fly in and out of Vie.
Oh, the locals will indeed, but VIE will still lose because non-locals won't pass through it any longer on their way to NRT, of course!
Not to mention not every passenger is of the same value to an airport operator.
I suppose Atlantis can confirm one of the main reasons BRU is so fond of attracting more intercontinental flying is because it knows the revenu from a single passenger on one of those flights is far higher than from any other kind of passenger, so these are expensive losses in fact.
Besides hub airports have thousands of square feet of office space, hotels, parkings and meeting rooms to fill: I doubt it's easy to fill those if your portfolio of destinations consists of regional leisure routes only: have a look at CRL and compare it to BRU, first in passenger numbers and than other revenu sources.
See the point?
Finally, let's look beyond just the own balance sheet and go for the wider picture for a second.
An international airport is today's gateway to a county: the better connected this country is, the easier it is to conduct business there and the more investment it can attract, so for any country it's of prime importance to have as many links as possible with the outside world, and especially places where business is conducted.
Are you seriously telling us medium sized countries like Austria or Belgium should just give up and become SME territory only? While The Netherlands or Switzerland can go for big business?
It's interesting to note how the latter two have a restricted airport preventing an unlimited LCC influx and thus allow the home based airline to support a global network… has it ever crossed your mind that it may actually be a smart idea to somehow create an airport environment similar to theirs in support of the countries global economy?
The thing is the European Single Market is a broken market, in that it ONLY levels the playing field WITHIN the European market, so it benefits only those companies which ONLY operate either completely IN it or OUT (as it doesn't affect them), vs those who are of mixed operations.
It's not just related to aviation btw, it's in every field in fact and it's starting to be understood by the EU too: just look at the ridiculous way in which the EC prevented Siemens to merge with Alstom to make a real competitor for Chinese companies, because it would create a too big group within the EU.
https://bruegel.org/2019/03/the-alstom- ... champions/
Seriously: there has to be some consideration of the wider picture beyond just the immediate positive effect for the European consumer, because we're about to give a large part of our economic activity in Europe away just for the sake of an obsession to have unlimited competition and the lowest price possible on certain routes only, whereas on other similar routes we clearly don't care? Indeed, why should it be made possible to fly for 30 euro to VIE but not LHR for instance? Because the latter happens to be capacity restricted by historic size, iso by political choice? And so at airports which happen to be restricted by size, the home based airlines can happily continue to charge vistitors to their country's gateway a premium in support of their global network, whereas at the others those airlines can't? So effectively countries which happen to have limited the capacity of their aiport somehow in the past can now have their economy reap the benefit of that reluctancy to invest in infrastructure, whereas those who have provided ample capacity can't and have to settle for an economic loss? Weird reasoning to say the least.