Originally Posted by
sailingfun
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.
IST was on the 764 in 2010 and the 330 in 2011 summers. ER in the winter. Not sure about this summer though. And unlike many destinations, it continued throughout the winter months, albeit on a reduced weekly frequency. Probably not a lot of cruise traffic in December. I do think Turkish Air's recent expansion has really hurt yields in that market. But SD's statement makes it sound as if we are dropping IST all together, not just suspending it for the winter. Is that not the case?
Berlin... it's a strange one. We can make Dusseldorf and Stuttgart pay, but not Berlin? The largest city in Germany? I'd think there is business traffic there, maybe we just haven't figured out how to sell it. And there too, Air Berlin flooded that market with seats. They're not doing all that well I hear.
One thing for sure, we are feeding passengers to Air France/KLM in ever larger numbers now as we increase gauge on the hub to hub flights. Which probably helps their bottom line in these lean times.