Originally Posted by
flyallnite
I was very surprised to hear that Istanbul has been dropped. SD said the yields are too low despite high load factors. We recently up gauged the service and have served the market for 20 years. The Turkish economy is a bright spot in Europe. It would have been more accurate to say that Turkish Air chased us out with their recent expansion. Just like Air Berlin did.
What did we upguage the route from? It's been a 7er almost all the time. It's a 7er today and has been for a while. 3 years ago we had two marketing guys on the IST flight going over to talk to the Turks. They stated the route was on the bubble then because it was mostly low yield cruise ship traffic. I am surprised it lasted this long.
We have tried over and over to make Berlin work. There have been at least 3 different attempts over the last 20 years to fly it nonstop. In addition we tried one stops with another city such as Warsaw and could not make it work. The last non stop attempt was subsidized by Berlin. When that stopped so did the route. There was virtually no business travel to support the flight.