Could Istanbul be a possible route for easyJet ? If it was and Turkish have got wind of it maybe that’s why they have gone twice daily from Birmingham and not tried Bristol.
It seems like no one is keen to take on Easy at Bristol !
Istanbul is a city break isn’t it ? All be it a bit further afield than the usual .
I know several people from south of Bristol who have used Turkish from Birmingham for a few days in Istanbul, indeed I would consider it
easyJet would be only point to point to IST. The much greater value of a Turkish Airlines connection would be its feeding into the airline's network to the East, and if they can get some Australasia routes and others not currently served when the new IST becomes operational very soon they could begin to be a substutute for the lack of a MEB3 to a degree.
I might have over-egged the BHX Turkish increase in that I learned on the BHX thread today that it is an increase from 12 weekly to 14 weekly and they used to fly the latter frequency in 2016.
EZY are super strong at BRS but would Istanbul be a route that interested them? Do they even fly to Istanbul? I'd have thought EZY would look at more leisure type routes or more city break routes.
easyJet does not currently use IST.
Nearly half of easyJet's well over 4 million BRS passengers per year use the airline for business purposes so it's far more than a leisure airline at BRS. The strength of the region's economy might be one reason why easyJet operates a disproportionately high number of routes and flights from BRS relative to the airport's size.
https://www.bristolairport.co.uk/ab...s-and-media-centre/2017/3/easyjet-record-2016
easyJet flies year-round to eleven European capitals plus Edinburgh and Belfast, as well as seasonal routes to Reykjavik and Sofia (beginning this winter). easyJet also flies to a number of other important European business centres. Ryanair flies to five other European capitals plus Sofia which it too will begin as a seasonal route later this year, albeit the capital city seasonal routes from BRS are mainly leisure-orientated. The other European capital served is Brussels, by flybmi year-round.
It would be a bad thing for the local economy if easyJet began to turn its back on the routes used heavily by business travellers in favour of more leisure routes that would simply put it into greater competition with the likes of TUI and Thomas Cook. Their track record at BRS with 'business routes' suggest that they would have little reason to alter this approach substantially. Some of the routes could stand higher frequencies given the passenger numbers, but that's always a tricky point because increased passenger numbers gained through additional frequency don't always mean a corresponding increase in yield for an airline.
Turkish to IST on a daily frequency would be positive for both leisure and business travellers, whether making for Turkey or further afield.
