sean1982 wrote:
Maybe get your facts right before you decide to try and spin some hearsay into info!
You know Sean, the thing is that as time goes by, much of the things ryanair have claimed about their performance at BRU and you believe to be true simply don't hold grounds any longer in the face of indirect operational data which become available.
Let's try to have a look at it together, shall we?
1- CRL is known to have lost 35,000 pax net in March, despite the fact that as good as all airports and airlines in Europe report higher passenger numbers on the back of a timid global economic recovery, so it is safe to assume this effect must also be also felt at CRL.
This means that the number of passengers actually shifting from CRL to BRU must be higher than the reported net loss of 'just' 35,000 passengers in March, however.
Let's be conservative still and estimate it at something like 55,000+, which would mean that thanks to the improved economy in Europe, there's actually still an underlying growth of 5% vs. last year in CRL then.
55,000+ of CRL passengers opting for BRU in March also comes close to roughly 700,000 per year if extrapolated to an annual basis, or the amount of its current passengers CRL feared would be seen to depart to BRU.
2- BRU gained close to 125,000 extra passengers in March vs last year, with Brussels Airport attributing the growth to both additional low cost activity as well as higher loads on full service airlines.
Brussels Airlines is known to having reported 25,000 more passengers in March, so let's be conservative once again and give Ryanair the full balance of those other 100,000 extra passengers at BRU for March.
100,000 passengers nicely matches the 70% loadfactor in March which got reported by insiders who happen to have access to your airlines' data at BRU.
Now, if we combine these 2 known facts, it shows us a picture in which more than half the passengers boarding the new ryanair flights in BRU are in fact simply coming over from CRL and whereas this means ryanair is indeed attracting many new passengers in BRU too, it may just not be enough to offset the extra costs of adding extra capacity on routes already served by Ryanair from CRL, especially not given the high cost basis in BRU, because remember that in essence you have to recover all the costs of the flying from BRU with the revenues from just the extra passengers alone, of course.
I know the figures I tried to deduct from airport operational figures are not exact science and I may indeed be off by a couple of thousand on both accounts, but even in the case of me misestimating to your disadvantage 2 times, the reality is that the first available airport figures after the opening of BRU as a new Ryanair destination show that ryanair's new market at BRU is acting very much as a communicating vessel to its traditional market in CRL (and to a lesser extend probably also Eindhoven, Maastricht and maybe even Lille, which I am sure you've noticed, I all left out), a less than ideal situation which would obviously require them to immediately put a hold to any further expansion plans from BRU for now, just as we see happening.
