News: Zurich flights increased from London City
Flights > News > # 1238 (02/04/2007)
Swiss has added an early morning flight from London City to Zurich.
The 7am departure starts on April 10 with an additional 8pm return, giving the airline flights between the two financial centres at roughly two-hour intervals.
Swiss also now offer daily UK connections to and from Tokyo via Zurich after increasing its weekly frequencies from six to seven in February. From mid-July, the carrier will also provide daily services to Los Angeles, Santiago and Johannesburg via Zurich. All these destinations were previously served six times a week.
Swiss’ UK and Ireland marketing manager, Iwan Kip, said: "The UK and Ireland is an extremely important market for Swiss, especially given the significance of the connection between the financial hubs of London and Zurich.”
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Comment:
Competition for flights to Zurich is really hotting up at London City, with Swiss now having to take on competition from new British Airways subsidiary CityFlyer and Air France offshoot City Jet. We can't help wondering what London City's largest base airline, VLM, are making of all this - they are probably quite happy to let the three dogs fight it out between them, whilst they continue to employ their short-range turboprops on niche routes like Liverpool, Antwerp and Rotterdam, where they face no competition.
Yields will always be good on Zurich flights because it is such a key banking centre. However, is there really a need for three airlines to compete on this one route from London City? I think that Swiss will always have a natural advantage, because they can offer onward connections as well as serving the lucrative point-to-point market. Despite all this, the leisure market for flights to Zurich is far less competitive, even though Easyjet are restarting their Luton to Zurich flights later this year. This is not particularly surprising, considering Zurich airport's reputation for high handling charges, but Zurich still offers the best means of access to many of Switzerland's finest ski resorts, and centres of population. Any business route will always have spare capacity at certain times of the day, so surely an opportunity is being missed to target leisure passengers here?
