Brussels Airlines to start US service in 2012

[LJ]

If there is one destination that they should consider, it's definitely Houston. And there are some very good reasons for them to pick Houston:

1. No one operates non stop service on the Brussels - Houston - Brussels stretch. No direct competition.
2. Houston is the 4th largest city in the USA, population wise
3. Houston is a typical business destination
4. Oil capital of the world, with headquarters of some of the largest oil companies
5. Usually high yielding destination. The oil dollars usually pay for premium business class
6. Natural location. Possibility to offer code share connections to the west, east, north and south from Houston, thanks to the soon to be biggest UA hub. This will permit SN to offer one stop South and Central American destinations such as Mexico City, Cancun, Buenos Aires, Lima, Quito, Guatemala and many more from Brussels.
7. If timed well, possibility to feed African and European flights into the Houston flight and creating unique city pairs with little or no competition
8. Lure away passengers from AF and KLM, who make huge profits on their oil run to Houston
9. Houston has a considerable Indian population. Code share possibilities with 9W, who can offer Houstonians one stop service to Chennai, Mumbai and Delhi and offering 9W a fourth destination in the USA without own investment and risks.

Though your arguments may be valid, you're missing one vital point. There is not much local traffic between Houston and Brussels. The reason why KLM can sustain 10 weekly flights is called Shell. None of the Shell employees will drive to Brussels to take the flight if their company has a Skyteam contract. Moreover, SN is very weak in both Scandinavia (most notably Norway) and Scotland (SN doesn't serve Aberdeen). Thus SN is not interesting for oil companies.

[tolipanebas]

To me it's a no brainer it will be JFK and that they will use the A332 on the route.

An A332 would be most logic for a daily transatlantic flight from BRU indeed, but then such a bird would be somewhat of the odd one out in the SN fleet and make it more difficult to rotate planes between our long haul destinations. Personally, although I prefer the A332 for a JFK flight too, I wouldn't be very surprised to see them get another A333 just to retain full fleet flexibility, even though the A333 may be a bit too big for a transatlantic route from BRU (especially during low season): much will depend on the lease terms too, of course.

If they decide to get an A332 now, it will definitely not be their only one for sure, as they can very well use the version on some African destinations too in order to de-triangle them or to increase frequencies quicker than they can do now with the bigger A333, so fingers crossed! Such planes would allow for a much quicker expansion in AFI, later!

I would have thought expanesion in AFI would have had the priority. So much opportunities for SN on this market still to be exploited. I should have thought next 3 or 4 A33x would serve AFI and only the 4 further NA.

SN seem to be convinced they are seriously hindered in selling their current African destinations on the US market because of the chronic lack of a North American link of their own. They do have a point in that flights by UA and 9W are already quite full without any feed from Africa, meaning SN have access only to relatively few and expensive seats for their pax connecting to/from AFI, so much even it is not unseen to have pax fly in on AA or DL even! Whether this warants 'the waste' of an A330 on a daily transatlantic service remains to be seen.

African destinations are definitely higher yielding than any North American ones, yet Africa is also a relatively low volume market and you basically need to scrape pax from pretty much everywhere you can just to fill a long haul plane a couple a times a week, so the remaining opportunities in Africa may be ample indeed, but may not be so tempting when all you can link with are European destinations...
Most of the low hanging fruit may have been plucked already, unless SN can add more North American feed to the equasion, so a daily flight to JFK can be seen as a sort of an urgently needed feeder route more than anything else, I think.

Still very disappointed they let YUL slip into the hands of AC though: now that would have been a far far better opportunity than JFK as not only would it have been a very good feeder route for AFI, but also would it have attracted much more European pax -notably from France- than a daily flight to JFK (or any other US east coast destination) will ever manage to do!

[sn-remember]

Refering to previous post of Tolipanebas:
Allowing AC to fly the YUL route was indeed a major professional fault denoting an unbelievable lack of interest at SN's mgt ! I jumped on my seat when I learned this last yr ! Any a/c on lease (be it a 767 if no other possible option) could have done the job, wet-leased if necessary.
Anyhow as a side question, I am wondering about the range capability of the future A321NEOS. If it can cross the pond on routes such as bru-yul/bos, it's an attractive proposal for SN .. It could moreover be used on some AFI and ME routes to increase frequencies and network, not mentioning opportunities on high density intra-european routes.(end of side question)

Coming back to the possible aquisition of the A332 and mgt issues vs the 333:
1. There is FULL compatibility between the types
2. At times for tech or biz reasons the a:c type can be swapped you know let's say between Jfk and any afi desti. Lots of airlines do that, TK comes in mind, it's part of "yeald" mgt, trying to optimise the a/c type vs the trafic load in a more dynamic way (an old debate)
3. And there seems to be 2 ex-LX A332 available at ZRH ..

Concerning the opportunity to feed the AFI ntwk via SN's own metal to NA :
You have a point, bearing in mind that a strong European foothold is still necessary bcs this NA-AFI feeding is marginal (around 15% I was told). I would also encourage ANA and Asiana to start flights to BRU asap in accordance with SN's W-AFI wave of flights.
However, it's my idea that SN can still pluck many fruits in AFI (low and less low hanging). The strategy to set BRU as THE *A AFI g/w must get a wider approval/momentum at LH's top mgt. More dailies are possible, new routes also.
Given the cost of opening new routes, some clear strategy must be put in place now. In my view AFI must still substantially grow ... why not in parallel with some NA coverage, why not if necessary ?

[cnc]

Coming back to the possible aquisition of the A332 and mgt issues vs the 333:
1. There is FULL compatibility between the types
2. At times for tech or biz reasons the a:c type can be swapped you know let's say between Jfk and any afi desti. Lots of airlines do that, TK comes in mind, it's part of "yeald" mgt, trying to optimise the a/c type vs the trafic load in a more dynamic way (an old debate)
3. And there seems to be 2 ex-LX A332 available at ZRH ..

we would be talking about a fleet of 5 A333's and 1 A332, not a TK fleet of 6 A333's, 7 A332's, 13 77W's etc

[Darjeeling]

SN seem to be convinced they are seriously hindered in selling their current African destinations on the US market because of the chronic lack of a North American link of their own. They do have a point in that flights by UA and 9W are already quite full without any feed from Africa, meaning SN have access only to relatively few and expensive seats for their pax connecting to/from AFI, so much even it is not unseen to have pax fly in on AA or DL even! Whether this warants 'the waste' of an A330 on a daily transatlantic service remains to be seen.

A waste ? ? And what about the missed sales because there is no N.A feeding capacity ? You think you can have an airlines with REAL growth abilities while relying exclusively on codeshares for a market like N.A ? I speak about competing with a beast like AF/KL. SN is now even attacked by a company like TK in AFI.
As for the 6th and 7th it will be A332. HB-IQA is almost ready.

[tolipanebas]

Refering to previous post of Tolipanebas:
Allowing AC to fly the YUL route was indeed a major professional fault denoting an unbelievable lack of interest at SN's mgt ! I jumped on my seat when I learned this last yr !

Last year? They let YUL slip through their fingers 4 years ago, when they weren't even part of STAR and had to decide where to deploy their 4th A333.

As a side question, I am wondering about the range capability of the future A321NEOS. If it can cross the pond on routes such as bru-yul/bos, it's an attractive proposal for SN .. It could moreover be used on some AFI and ME routes to increase frequencies and network, not mentioning opportunities on high density intra-european routes.

But the neo pretty much is a paper plane until the mid of the second half of this decade.
You can not build an expansion plan on planes that can only arrive in 2016/2017 at best: SN must grow its long haul before that, and they must do it with A330s.

Coming back to the possible aquisition of the A332 and mgt issues vs the 333:
1. There is FULL compatibility between the types
2. At times for tech or biz reasons the a:c type can be swapped you know let's say between Jfk and any afi desti. Lots of airlines do that

I know all of that, my friend and if you'd be talking 2 point-to-point routes which are not range-restricted for either subtype you'd have a valid point they can use the larger plane where more capacity is needed, but mind you however, ALL of our A333 routes at SN are TRIANGULARS, meaning they are normally carrying A LOT of pax/cargo ALWAYS. At least that's how the capacity is offered in the GDS, and SN are doing a great job filling that capacity, so although it could happen that on a given day, you'd indeed be able to substitute an A333 on a triangular with a much smaller A332, it will far more often happen you'll find the A332 being simply too small to replace an A333 without bumping off some pax/cargo. Not really ideal, is it?
Seriously, the real world fleet flexibility is nowhere near the theoretical flexibility, not because of lack of crew commonality or something like that, but because of commercial restraints of our network...

Concerning the opportunity to feed the AFI ntwk via SN's own metal to NA :
You have a point, bearing in mind that a strong European foothold is still necessary bcs this NA-AFI feeding is marginal (around 15% I was told).

15% at present, yet SN believes it can substantially grow if they serve the US themselves.
If indeed they manage to more than double it share, it isn't going to be "marginal" any longer like you call it and the strategy will have paid off. Personally, I think they'll need more than just 1 transatlantic route for that, however, but okay, it's a start.

The strategy to set BRU as THE *A AFI g/w must get a wider approval/momentum at LH's top mgt. More dailies are possible, new routes also.

And for that, more A332s would be ideal, hence my comment that an A332 for their first US route will not be the only one in the fleet for long, also for the reason given above. A single A332 in a fleet of A333s (all used on triangulars) is going to proof a pain in the proverbial place during peak times!

Given the cost of opening new routes, some clear strategy must be put in place now. In my view AFI must still substantially grow ... why not in parallel with some NA coverage?

Hey, you have my vote, but do you have the money too?

A waste ? ? And what about the missed sales because there is no N.A feeding capacity ? You think you can have an airlines with REAL growth abilities while relying exclusively on codeshares for a market like N.A ? I speak about competing with a beast like AF/KL. SN is now even attacked by a company like TK in AFI.
As for the 6th and 7th it will be A332. HB-IQA is almost ready.

It was a figure of speech to use the word 'waste', given some here questioned SN's strategy of opening a first route to the US before adding more AFI destinations... it is certainly not an expression of my opinion on the matter, as you can derive from my posts, although I do hope we will not lose ourselves too much in competing over connecting pax which do not go to AFI: luckily we can ride the back of LH/LX and the entire ATI here.

[HighInTheSky]

As for the 6th and 7th it will be A332. HB-IQA is almost ready.

What do you mean with that?

As far as I know, we only expect the 6th at the end of October at earliest....

[tolipanebas]

As far as I can check it, HB-IQA was used by SWISS on their TLV route for the last couple of days and is still in full SWISS outfit. The only LX A332 currently not used is HB-IQC.

Interestingly enough, SWISS' last A332 will be HB-IQQ and this is an ex-Sabena plane even, so that one would be very welcome at Brussels Airlines for sure, but unfortunately it is already earmarked for Air Berlin.

[Atlantis]

Some more info.

Brussels Airlines is at this moment only looking for new flights to North-America and Africa.
Geert Sciot said that there are some potential destinations in North-America to fly to with own metal (We know what destinations that will be). This is important when Jet Airways will choose Skyteam iso Star.

The same for Africa were they will further deploy their presence.


http://www.luchtvaartnieuws.nl/nl-NL/Ar ... _Azi%c3%ab

[Bralo20]

As far as I can check it, HB-IQA was used by SWISS on their TLV route for the last couple of days and is still in full SWISS outfit. The only LX A332 currently not used is HB-IQC.

Interestingly enough, SWISS' last A332 will be HB-IQQ and this is an ex-Sabena plane even, so that one would be very welcome at Brussels Airlines for sure, but unfortunately it is already earmarked for Air Berlin.

HB-IQA & HB-IQC are for some time now up for sale without having a buyer.

HB-IQQ is indeed being sold to Air Berlin and is scheduled to enter service in august with registration D-ABXB.

IQA & IQC are indeed being rumoured to head over to SN's fleet. Like said... Only rumours at the moment (though quite strong) and the fact they are up for sale without a buyer can mean that they will indeed end up at SN for a "bargain" price.