The Birmingham Post today has an article about Akal Air who are to offer a through service from Birmingham to Amristar via Vienna from next month. It states that Air India’s BHX route was more profitable than any of the LHR routes yet chose to gave BHX up in favour of LHR so they could preserve “valuable LHR slots”. In this era of losses, why would an airlne sacrifice a profitable route?

Article is here

It’s not quite so simple. I think the profitability of the London-India routes has taken a pounding because of competition, as pointed out by Future Pilot. Virgin has just announced a temporary suspension of services to Mumbai due to excess capacity and falling demand, I assume they’re hoping one of the Indian carries will go belly-up in the near future to reduce capacity.

Anyway, back to the main point. I do not see any assertion that London is not profitable for Air India, purely that they claim BHX was more profitable (probably on a per passenger basis, not a city pair basis), and therefore they are not necessarily operating a loss making route to LHR. They will be keen to retain London in their network because they will want to retain customer loyalty in order to preserve the whole of their network. If they drop London and those business travellers using London switch to one of the other airlines, then they are likely to switch to the other airlines full stop as their network grows. I think this would have been an easy decision for AI. Once they’d given up slots at LHR they would have struggled to get back such favourable positions.

If I’m honest I’m not sure how much I believe the statement anyway, and I note it comes with no reference which always rings alarm bells. Modern journalism takes hear-say and makes it fact!:eek: