I never implied the need for any airline to go bust.
I am not saying you said or implied that! All I said is that I feel there may be a massive oversupply of seats to and from the middle east. And since I do not expect any of the Princes of Kings to have the guts to scale back voluntarily I fear that involuntary cutbacks will be going to happen. Either airlines going entirely or getting much smaller.
And I quoted DUS as an example of the kind of destinations that these airlines feed from, so therefore likely possibilities. The airline market is much more contestable than it used to be and indeed I do believe Qatar could enter this market.
Personally I would say that there are other destinations in Europe that could be more lucrative for a ME airline (not necessarily Qatar. Etihad, Emirates etc can do so too). For instance, AMS lacks a pax fligt from any ME airline. KLM has that market pretty much cornered. Only a fey freight services from Emirates and Qatar. In the past Jordanian and Kuwait used to fly here but they gave up.
There are good prime examples of markets similar to DUS which support such services. Take MAN for example, it has 2 Emirates services daily and (when I last looked) 4 flights per week by Qatar, but I am not fooled, I believe that it is capacity shortage which holds Qatar back from expanding at MAN.
I sincerely hope so. I do not want to see any airline go belly up. I really don’t.
You seem to have missed a little of the point with your comment about the 4 carriers in the area taking market share. A lot of the business of Emirates and Qatar is not even to their home nation or the regional market, it is long haul, from one continent to another via their home nation.
Must have missed that indeed. But even then, a transfer hub is only as strong as the the destinations served. In Europe Schiphol is one of the largest transfer points. That is not because KLM serves every destination. All the other airlines offering fligths to destinations help. I am curious to see if all the main hubs in the ME will get services from other nations. Dubai will definately rank high there, but Abu Dhabi? Doha?
As it happens Gulf Air has now started turning in a profit, so you’ll be stuck if you expect that one to go bust too soon.
That’s true, but even then I see a problem in the long term. The owners of Gulf Air used to be very happy with it. Gulf Air was the only estabilished airline in the region. Now each of the owner nations has their own airline. All owners (except Oman) have a huge airline with even larger ambitions. How long will it take for the owners of Gulf Air to decide that Gulf Air takes away to much passengers from their new airlines? That more then anything else will probably be a problem for Gulf Air. As long as profits are made nothing will change. But what will the gulf states do when Gulf Air makes no profit? It will happen sooner or later, rather later if you ask me.
Typically air travel is growing at a rate of around 5% per annum, by 2020 the number of passengers travelling will have DOUBLED, therefore if you’re not sure whether airports can sustain airlines such as Qatar and Emirates then look at what each airport has now from these carriers and AT LEAST double it (long haul routes are growing very fast). Remember these planes will not be delivered tomorrow and have to be put onto routes, they will be delivered through to 2015, by which time air travel will be nearing that doubling.
Good point.
Your comments have concerned me about people’s understanding of air transport :confused:
Sorry to hear so. 🙁
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