November 8, 2005 at 6:25 pm
CWL has recently been pushing out the boat to get new scheduled routes particularly to Europe. The airport reiterated this in the statement above. They now have a direct rail link to Cardiff and Bridgend, a new Express hotel, a newly resurfaced runway, a refurbished terminal and a new corporate identity and website. They have launched a high profile advertising campaign to get people to book flights directly from the new airport website, http://www.cwlfly.com . But so far all this has done little to achieve it’s aim. The charter sector has seen large scale expansion, with Thomsonfly added new long haul routes and increased frequencies, Excel moving into the airport seving 12 destinations, and FirstChoice adding Naples. All this boosts numbers by about 600,000. However the scheduled sector ahs seen little expansion. You can book a few routes with Excel, and Thomsonfly have introduced 4 typical Spanish coast destinations, and Zoom have announced Vancouver as we as extending Toroto, but these are only small when compared to the entire scheduled traffic at the airport. Aside from these we have bmibaby, probably the most unproductive and unambious airline ever, KLM to Amsterdam (the most popular scheduled route with 164,000), Ryan to Dublin and Air Wales, who despite offering a number of routes and being committed to the airport, are simply not big enough to make that big enough impact. There are loads of routes that scheduled airlines, loco or non loco, could easily make a success of, but for some reason none seem to want to. The facilities are in place and the demand is there. The obvious problem is BRS, but even that can’t be enough to deter airlines. From Cardiff it takes 40 mins-1hour to get to CWL, it takes at least 1hr30 to get to BRS, and even longer if you are one of the 1.3 million people living in Cardiffs catchment in the Valleys. Add to this time advantage the facilities and weather record and CWL is a safe bet. Loads of aircraft due to land st BRS in the morning end up on CWL becuase of fog etc. Why don’t airlines want to come to CWL??? And is there anyone in the frame to arrive soon?