News: Virgin axe Bahamas flights from London
Flights > News > # 1124 (15/12/2006)
Virgin Atlantic is scrapping its flights from London Gatwick to the Bahamas next April.
It has been reported that the weekly service to Nassau has been axed due to poor sales.
Customers who have already bought tickets for flights from April 17 onwards can either be re-routed on the airline’s London Heathrow to Miami service with an onward connection to Nassau with Bahamas Air, or claim a full refund. Passengers are advised to contact the agent where they bought the ticket for more details.
Virgin’s withdrawal leaves only British Airways operating direct flights from London to Nassau. BA run five flights a week from Heathrow to Nassau.
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Considering the recent attention given to the Bahamas due to Daniel Craig’s first outing as James Bond in the phenomenally successful movie Casino Royale, it might initially seem a little bit surprising that Virgin Atlantic are cancelling all their flights to Nassau. With Sir Richard Branson making an Alfred Hitchcock style split-second cameo appearance in the film, together with heavy product placement for Virgin Atlantic aircraft in the Miami airport scenes, could this move have been more badly timed? Of course, airline routes are not driven by the silver screen, but film locations tourism is still big business, and no fictitious character has more stamps on his passport than 007.
So why have Virgin been unable to make this route work? The Bahamas are certainly not lacking in appeal - in fact, there has been substantial investment in tourism and related property development in recent years, not least around the Atlantis resort on Paradise Island, which is one of the locations in Casino Royale. Snobbish Brits might say that this new generation of hotels has much more appeal to the American market than it does to them, but we rather suspect that Virgin’s poor sales on this route boil down to a much more mundane matter of aircraft and geography.
Whereas popular Caribbean destinations such as St Lucia, Barbados and Antigua have nearly all their resorts within a one-hour minibus drive of their respective airports, the Bahamas are spread across some 700 islands and thousands of tiny cays, with major resorts being situated just as much around Grand Bahama / Freeport as they are on New Providence and Paradise Islands. Whilst the capital Nassau, which is on New Providence Island, is connected to Paradise Island by a road bridge link, many other resorts in the Bahamas can only be reached by taking an additional connecting flight from the dilapidated Nassau airport.
With Virgin Atlantic only offering one flight each week, their schedule put them in a similar bracket to a charter carrier, and made additional connections between the islands much more cumbersome. By comparison, British Airways continue to operate five weekly flights to the Bahamas, giving their passengers a much more flexible choice of dates. On many routes where British Airways and Virgin Atlantic compete head-to-head, Virgin is able to offer at least a daily service, and in certain cases a higher frequency than British Airways. This is much harder to do on their Nassau flights, a route on which British Airways operate Boeing 767 aircraft. In order to offer their clients are a much more attractive schedule, Virgin would have had to have increased capacity at least twofold on this route, but whether they used the Airbus A340 or Boeing 747-400, they would always have ended up with more seats to fill than British Airways.
Virgin Atlantic are still offering flights to Nassau as an onward connection with Bahamas Air via Miami. There’s not much about Bahamasair that we can recommend, especially as the transfer through Miami involves a change of terminal, and the hassle of clearing US customs and immigration and rechecking your bags. For the return journey, you can at least clear these formalities in Nassau airport, but you’d need strong loyalty to the Virgin brand to bother with such a palaver, over taking the much easier direct flight with British Airways.
