2019

Climate change. We’ve all heard of it. Scientists around the world have been warning us for decades about the dangers of a warmer planet but rarely have such organised and persistent climate protests taken place on the scale that has been seen recently.

I’m heading off to Beijing for the 3rdChina – Europe Aviation Summit in Beijing next week. It’s a high-level event to which all the major Chinese carriers send high-level delegations, and the content is always interesting with some fascinating insights from the local airlines on how they see the market.

An interesting few days in Valencia at AviaDev Europe coincided with the  Valencia Half-Marathon taking place over the following weekend and in some ways that captured the whole spirit of AviaDev. Running a half marathon, even dressed as a Gorilla as Jon Howell will confirm,is a steady journey of progress;  regional connectivity is an equally slow but positive journey. Gorillas can be scary and so can air service development!

With the MIDAS Aviation team heading for Valencia in the next day or two for AviaDev Europe, we’ve been preparing for plenty of discussion about regional aviation in Europe by providing AviaDev with several articles about different aspects of the industry and the market. There’s one about the impact and implications of the demise of a number of European airlines that we’ve seen this year. We look at long haul connectivity for regional airports in another and the most recent one looks at the use of turboprops. 

From their humble beginnings in Leicestershire in 1841 running train trips, Thomas Cook became a pioneering figure in the European travel industry and for many years dominated holiday travel in the UK and beyond.  

While commercial airlines have always been retailers, selling seats on planes, there used to be blue sky between what we all thought of as an airline and what we meant when we talked about retailers. Today that space has reduced considerably and it’s not always clear which is which. 

Virgin Atlantic’s announcement that they will drop services to St Lucia from London Gatwick has probably come after a serious game of airline/destination poker as the revenue guarantee that supports such services has come around for an inevitable renegotiation.

Living as I do fairly close to Heathrow Airport, I took up an invitation a few days ago to attend one of the 43 Airport Expansion Consultation events being held between June and September. These events, held in towns and communities from Woking to Wimbledon and Leatherhead to Lambeth, and hosted by Heathrow Airport, are an opportunity for the airport to present plans for the new runway and for individuals to provide feedback.

It's refreshing to visit a market where things are happening and the Riga Aviation Forum showed just how vibrant the market is and how important aviation is to so many industry sectors. We were there giving a perspective of how the market could change in the coming years with some quite compelling analysis of the need for airline consolidation in Europe. We also covered the regional airports opportunity, a sector which seems to be having a growth spurt.

For many airlines, airport slots are more valuable than their whole operation and no more so than at London Heathrow where slots get traded, swapped and borrowed in a continual merry go round of activity. It’s a sure sign of a failing airline when they depart Heathrow for another London airport with a cheque normally following from another carrier. It’s also sometimes why some airlines acquire others although that may be “virgin” on the ridiculous as a way to grow a business.

Africa. Frequently mentioned as an after thought, rarely making the aviation headlines yet full of opportunities or threats depending on your SWOT perspective. The recent AviaDev Africa Conference in Cape Town provided an insight into some of these opportunities and challenges.

We’ll be at AviaDev in Cape Town next week and are looking forward to engaging again with the airlines, airports and tourism bodies working to improve African connectivity. With African aviation in mind, we’ve read the recent Euromonitor International report “Megacities: Developing Country Domination”[1] with interest.

Well, that is a surprise, JetBlue finally getting off the fence and confirming an interest in operating from New York JFK and Boston to London using their A321LR’s. We hadn’t been expecting that at all! But the announcement seems a little odd; twelve or even twenty-four months ahead of a likely start and no London airport selected, so what’s the plan then?

We’ve been increasingly working to help airports understand what it means to be “China ready”. With the prospect that one in four international travellers could be Chinese by 2030, and the fact that Chinese travellers typically spend more than any other tourists, can any airport afford not to take seriously what this means. 

It used to be said if the United States sneezed, the world caught a cold. That certainly applied back in 2008. How times have changed. Today the focus is on China and what would happen if that market even stopped to blow its nose!