News: Newcastle to Gatwick flights on sale
Flights > News > # 1098 (30/11/2006)
Tickets for Jet2’s new flights between Newcastle and London Gatwick are now on sale.
The new service, which will see up to three flights a day between Newcastle and the capital, takes off on March 25. Gatwick will be the rapidly expanding no-frills airline’s 14th destination from its northeast hub.
Add to:
Related Airlines:
Related Airports:
Comment:
With British Airways having recently announced they are to cancel their Newcastle to Gatwick flights, and BmiBaby having recently pulled out of Durham Tees Valley altogether (one of their routes was to Gatwick), Jet2 have obviously decided they can profitably fill this gap in the market, even if their rival airlines didn't want to. Commercially, Jet2 would appear to be in a much stronger position to make this route work.
Despite recent cutbacks, British Airways still have a much higher cost base than the no-frills airlines, and they cannot offer the same quantity of high-value connections through Gatwick that they can at Heathrow. However, Jet2 has had mixed success on UK domestic flights compared with its international services. The budget carrier was unable to make Bournemouth to Belfast flights work, and its Manchester to Edinburgh flights were also withdrawn earlier this year. However, it is always much easier to put bums on seats on flights to London, and Jet2 already successfully operate cheap flights from Manchester to Gatwick, directly competing against British Airways.
Flying from Newcastle to Gatwick, and then taking the train back up into central London, seems like a bit of a dog-legged journey, especially considering that the train service between London and Newcastle is amongst the best in the UK. Travelling by train also means avoiding those horrendous security queues at Gatwick. Despite this, Gatwick still offers easy connections to many other parts of the southeast, not to mention access to a huge range of long-haul flights not available from Newcastle.
