earthman wrote:Sky Europe announced a route from POZ (is that the right code?) to AMS, my mother bought an AMS-POZ-AMS ticket, and of course the route got axed before any plane had even flown.
the story with Sky Europe was a little bit different... I'm not sure if You know that they've deceided to open new "hub" in Prague. So they have cancelled few newly opened routes - also this one from Poznan to Amsterdam. They have cancelled 3 routes from Krakow and one from Warsaw as well.
During our campaign we have had a meeting with person from Sky Europe and we know that possiblity they've received (to open Prague) was so atractive for them, so that they have changed plans imiedately.
earthman wrote:Warsaw, Szczecin, Łódź, Szczecin and Wrocław all have their own airports, besides, 'easy access' to those cities from Poznań is a bit of an overstatement. Like Brussels has easy acces to Amsterdam. Sure you can get there, but why would you go through Poznań? Besides, if you consider Warsaw easy to reach, you can fly from there. In fact, Berlin is closer, and also has good (excellent?) connections to various places. The easier these two places become to reach, the less reason airlines have to start flying to Poznań.
Of course that they have their own airports and I wish all of them good and satisfaying connections with European cities! But also Poznan has its own airport so why our citizens have to travel to Berlin or Warsaw? Why should they pay for car or train and loose few hours of their lifes just for a travel to airport which is like 270 km away?
What I've mentioned about the location of Poznan - it is/might be another strong point of the airport - being located between other cities which doesn't have sufificient number of connections, Poznan can be more atractive for air companies. They can use not only the potential of inhabitants of region and the city but also neighbouring areas! For example - if You consider that travel distance with train to Poznan is 2 h from Wroclaw, 2h 15 from Szczecin, 2h 27 min from Bydgoszcz and Torun it means than you can "collect" people from other regions! That is an advantage for airport which can be used in talks with companies.
earthman wrote:There are four daily flights to WAW by LOT, with onward connections to many other places. There are also four daily connections to Munich, by LOT and Lufthansa, and two daily connections to Frankfurt, by LOT. Yes it costs a lot, but if you need to get somewhere, you can. There are LCC flights to London and Dublin, which are the main LCC destinations people fly to from Poland anyway, it seems.
Germany is close enough that people will travel there by other means, although there are flights to several German cities (anyone ever heard of Dau Air? Who are they?).
The fact that there is only 6% unemployment would actually reduce the need for travel, since less people will be traveling to, say, the UK for work.
Just bird-eye view of map of Poland will give You answer of totally weird thing which is called - "flying to Western Europe across Warsaw". We loose time and money. What sence does it make to fly to the East 300 km and then fly back these 300 km to West and then more until reaching Paris, Amsterdam, Brussels...???
Flying to Munich and Frankfurt is good idea when you are going to US, but flying within Europe is rather hard... Again you loose time (it often happens that you have to wait because of delayes) and money. In Poznan itself you can find 92.000 registered companies - within 2.500 of them with foreign capital. Businessmen associated in "Rada Pasazerow" (Council of the Passengers) demand new connections to such important cities like Brussels, Paris, London (Gatwick or Heathrow), Amsterdam, Barcelona, Milan, Rome. For them change in Munich or Frankfurt doesn't solve the problem.
Flying from Poland because of labour reasons doesn't make a big impact on airport of city with law unemployment rate.
Counties of Poland which have unemp.rate around 30% don't have their airports - it is obvious that people who want to fly to UK go to big cities - no matter where, important is that they offer connections...
earthman wrote:what would you
need to get going is to advertise Poznań as a tourist destination. Right now, I suppose most tourists will go to Kraków, after all, who has heard of Poznań? (Besides it getting mentioned on every AMS-WAW flight with KLM by the pilots).
You are absolutely right!!!
and that is what we're going to make!
earthman wrote:it is nice that you
get people to sign a petition, but the fact that Sky Europe axed a route even before they started flying would indicate that not many people actually bought tickets.
I will try to tell You more about what we are doing now. What I can say - it is not only the petitions
As I said there are many issues which have put our airport into such situation. We are not the only one example (airports of Szczecin, Bydgoszcz and Lodz in some way deal with similar problems).
I will try to present you these problems on next days. So you will get more information and I think you will understand us better and our reasons which has put us to do such a campaign.
Thanks for commentary and greetings!
