News: BmiBaby on the up at Birmingham
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Flights > News > # 1095 (30/11/2006)
BmiBaby is set to become the biggest airline at Birmingham airport.
The no-frills airline has announced a major expansion at the Midlands’ leading airport, including four new routes as well as increased frequency on flights on some of their most popular services.
Daily flights to Barcelona and Rome (Fiumicino) will take off on March 25 and May 24 respectively, and there will be four flights a week to Lisbon and Marseille from May 25.
BmiBaby has also pledged to boost the frequency on some Mediterranean and domestic flights by up to 50% next summer.
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At last, a host of interesting new routes from Birmingham!
Barcelona
Flights to Barcelona might be ten a penny from the Midlands (BA Connect from Birmingham, Thomsonfly from Coventry, Ryanair to Barcelona Girona from East Midlands), but the other new BmiBaby destinations add some much needed spice to Birmingham’s route list.
Rome
The Eternal City needs no introduction, but getting there from the West Midlands has become much harder since Thomsonfly and British Airways cancelled their Rome flights, leaving Ryanair and Easyjet to fight it out at Nottingham East Midlands. Although Birmingham has always offered a good choice of routes to other major European countries such as Spain, France and Germany; its selection of flights to Italy has dwindled significantly in recent years, with routes to Turin (British Airways), Pisa (Mytravellite) and Venice (British Airways) all having shrivelled, leaving Milan as Birmingham's only Italian destination until these new flights were announced.
Naturally, we hope these flights to Rome will have a sense of permanence to them, so the fact that BmiBaby have shown the confidence to make this a daily route is particularly welcome. We have often commented on how new route decisions are driven by deals between airlines and airports as much as they are by latent demand, so it interesting to note that BmiBaby has selected the city's main Fiumicino airport above the more budget orientated Ciampino, which is a major centre for both Easyjet and Ryanair. With the ever weakening position of Alitalia, the main Italian airports have had to open themselves up to budget competition. In Milan, Easyjet set up shop in the city's main Malpensa airport, and Jet2 already operate cheap flights to Rome Fiumicino from Leeds and Manchester.
Lisbon
Until recently, Lisbon was largely off-limits for the budget airlines, who instead focused most of their activity on offering cheap flights to Faro on the Algarve, setting themselves up in direct competition with the charter operators. More recently, Easyjet has set up a small base in Lisbon, but most of their routes from the Portuguese capital are to other cities on the European mainland, with the exception of flights to London Luton. We’re glad to see BmiBaby launching the first cheap flights to Lisbon from anywhere outside London, and await with interest to see if they also look at Manchester to Lisbon flights in the near future.
Marseille
Celebrity chef Rick Stein has rightly been doing his best to push Marseille as an exciting culinary destination, and we really do hope that passengers taking advantage of BmiBaby's new flights to France's second city will spend time there rather than heading straight into Provence. Marseille is a tremendously vibrant city with some of the Mediterranean’s best fish restaurants.
Like Rome, airport deals will have had a major role to play here, as Marseille is one of the first European airports to open a dedicated terminal for budget airlines. With Flybe's recent expansion into Nice, and rapid development of other flights to France, we had expected them to have a keen eye on Marseille, but it looks like BmiBaby has beaten them to it. Again, as with Rome, there is a bit of a history of flights from the Midlands to Marseille, as it was one of the first cities to be served when Thomsonfly started its operations at Coventry in March 2004. Unfortunately, that route only survived one summer, with Thomsonfly executives later telling us that they didn't feel the market was quite ready to sustain this route any longer. Since then, the popularity of Marseille flights from regional airports outside London has grown tremendously, with Ryanair opening up a route from Glasgow Prestwick, and Easyjet launching cheap flights to Marseille from Liverpool and Bristol
We're sure that the new low-cost terminal, combined BmiBaby's established position at Birmingham, will ensure that this route works well to complement the airline's existing French routes to Nice and Bordeaux.
