News: BmiBaby to launch three new Birmingham routes
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Flights > News > # 1047 (03/11/2006)
BmiBaby will introduce three new routes from Birmingham International next spring.
BMI’s budget offshoot will offer twice daily flights to Glasgow, four flights a week to Murcia in southern Spain and a thrice-weekly service to Faro (Algarve) in Portugal on March 25.
BmiBaby’s managing director, Crawford Rix, said the new routes are the first wave of destination the airline will be launching as part of a major expansion at Birmingham during 2007. Earlier this month the no-frills carrier announced it was introducing three additional Boeing 737 aircraft to its fleet at Birmingham International, taking its total number of aircraft based at the airport to eight.
BmiBaby started operations at Birmingham in January 2005 and already flies to Aberdeen, Alicante, Amsterdam, Belfast International, Bordeaux, Cork, Edinburgh, Geneva, Knock, Nice, Malaga, Palma and Prague.
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Oh dear, what a bland set of new routes from BmiBaby. This is hardly the most inspiring news, but at least it probably makes good business sense for BMI’s budget offshoot.
In many respects, joining a market where there is already plenty of healthy competition should always be a reasonably safe bet, and it seems to be the strategy BmiBaby have been taking lately, having pulled away from Durham Tees Valley airport, where it appears that they did not see a large enough catchment area to fill their planes profitably. BmiBaby might nominally be a no-frills airline, but they have chosen to concentrate their operations on some of the UK's busiest regional airports like Birmingham and Manchester. Starting flights to Glasgow, in addition to the already announced Birmingham to Aberdeen flights, shows Bmibaby squaring up directly against Flybe and British Airways' regional subsidiary BA Connect. In this arena, BmiBaby might well have the cost advantage, but their rivals can still offer higher frequencies using smaller aircraft. It will also be interesting to see how regular commuters on these routes favour BmiBaby's larger, but by no means new Boeing 737-300 jets, over the smaller regional jets and turboprops favoured by Flybe and British Airways.
On the leisure front, we can think of numerous city break destinations which are not served by direct flights from Birmingham, or which are only served by higher cost traditional airlines. Perhaps Hungary's current political instability, combined with the high cost of using Ferihegy airport, makes Budapest a less attractive option than it might otherwise be, but there must be plenty of cities in France or Italy to which BmiBaby could operate flights with little or no competition. Some would argue that the consumer will always benefit from extra choice on flights to destinations such as Faro and Murcia, where the market is already proven, but how many of these seats will just be taken up by second home owners and their guests, who might now make eight trips each year instead of four? Ultimately, this extremely conservative move might simply end up forcing other rivals off these routes, therefore bring even fewer benefits to the Midlands traveller. In the meantime, Birmingham will continue to lag behind all those other regional airports which have shown that so many more interesting destinations can be made available, if the right combination of airport deal and risk-taking airline is available.
