Regular Liverpool and East Midlands flights to be scrapped

The Stansted and Exeter routes have been placed under review.

The decision to drop Liverpool was based on the fact that the island’s connectivity to the north of England had been via Manchester for a long time and that was difficult to change, Aurigny CEO Nico Bezuidenhout said.

Similarly, it was felt that Birmingham could take traffic from East Midlands.

Newquay, which was brought in to make use of an available aircraft during the school summer holidays, did not show enough demand for the route to appear again. Just 107 people flew on the weekly service in July and 272 in August.

The company is also going to be reviewing services to Stansted and Exeter.

Stansted was only relaunched earlier this year after being paused during the pandemic, while Aurigny took on the Exeter route when Flybe folded in 2020.

‘Exeter falls into that similar category [as East Midlands],’ Mr Bezuidenhout said.

He was aware that there were local students attending Exeter University.

‘Exeter is however very close to Bristol from an alternative connectivity point of perspective so Exeter is a route that we’ll review, what is the service pattern to Exeter, if any, going forward.’

The Stansted situation was similar and Mr Bezuidenhout said the review followed repeated calls for the airline to focus on lifeline routes.

Stansted and London City were both launched earlier this year.

As of the end of September 8,400 people had used the Stansted route, while 31,000 used London City, although the latter were offered a much more regular service than Stansted.

This compares with nearly 200,000 using Gatwick.

Aurigny’s service to London City had proven ‘one of the small little victories’ of the year in terms of its update, Mr Bezuidenhout said.

‘Consolidating your effort on one route, as opposed to splitting it across two, does help with resilience,’ he said.

‘Again, that doesn’t mean that we cannot look at ad hoc operations to Stansted, but not a frequent and regular service as we may have had this year.’

With some of the schedule for next year already published, he said that additional routes, such as Manchester, Birmingham and Bristol, would be added from the middle of this month with Paris, Dublin and Edinburgh to follow.

He also announced there would changes to the process of publishing some routes from December.

‘Instead of making flights available for one season at a time, lifeline routes will be available for 12-month rolling availability on a month-to-month basis.’

n Aurigny sent out emails about its new schedule yesterday, with people able to book on Gatwick, London City, Southampton and Alderney routes for next year. The website was running slowly as people hurriedly booked yesterday morning. By last night a one-way ticket from Gatwick to Guernsey on Sunday 27 April – the last day of the school Easter holidays – was £169.99.

n Thick fog caused problems at the airport throughout yesterday. Only two flights managed to land yesterday morning – a service from Jersey at about 8am and a London City service just before 10am.

All other services were diverted or cancelled.

Airlines then went on to cancel flights throughout the afternoon and evening as visibility remained poor.