How Aurigny’s City service could work...

My wife and I set up an asset management business based in Guernsey three years ago and we are prolific and grateful users of Aurigny, without which we would not have been able to operate such an international business from Guernsey. We have completed well over 100 rotations with Aurigny between Guernsey and London during that time.

That business, from zero in the space of three years, aside from salaries to its Guernsey-based employees, provides ongoing fee income to Guernsey fund administrators, Guernsey lawyers, Guernsey accountants, Guernsey tax advisers, Guernsey auditors, Guernsey brokerage houses, Guernsey custodians and the GFSC, in aggregate, of c.£250,000 per annum and growing.

Ninety-five per cent of the revenues that pay these wages have never set foot in Guernsey. In fact, for most of these clients we pull out a map to show them where it is. Many have heard of Jersey, but Guernsey remains either unknown, possibly quaint, or both. At this critical point in proceedings those same clients take comfort from the fact that Guernsey is connected to the grid; six to nine daily flights in and out of proper London airports always demonstrate the point.

Much has been written about the demise of the London City route. For an island there are two reasons why you have air routes: (1) to show you are open for business, as above, and (2) because you actually want people to use the service.

I share below the reasons why I think the City service struggled commercially:

l Landing at 8.45am at City, means you are still not able to start a meeting confidently in the City earlier than 9.45am, something you can also achieve with the 7am Gatwick flight;

l The rotation timings were not useful in the end for onward travel – we originally looked forward to better connections onward to Frankfurt and Zurich. However, by offering a day-trip service to City, Aurigny effectively made it impossible to make any sensible onward connection; the useful connections are either early morning or the early evening;

l Tickets to City were always significantly more expensive than Gatwick. Whenever I took the City route, I found it perplexing that I paid £149 one-way for a seat when more than half the plane was empty – by all means, keep a couple of seats at £149, but why not fill the rest of the plane at £70/seat?

l Most meetings in the private client, family office and even institutional fund management business now take place in the West End not the City, which is a change from five years ago;

l If you are London-based and successful, you live in West London; you might work in the City or Canary Wharf, but you are unlikely to want to make it out to City for a day return flight; Heathrow or Gatwick are your friends for day return trips.

So my suggestion here is that Aurigny explores a single rotation in/out City around mid-afternoon. That would allow Guernsey-based people to put in a morning’s work and still make a slick connection on to Frankfurt, Zurich and many other useful places that evening.

It would also allow City-based workers to fit in a morning’s work and make it from their office to Guernsey in good time for a lovely business dinner.

ADRIAN HARRIS,

Principal – Freedom Asset Management Ltd,

Maison Allaire,

Smith Street,

St Peter Port, GY1 2NG.