Bristol Airport has many different airlines providing flights to all kinds of destinations.
But it will no longer be able to offer a flight to Frankfurt courtesy of Lufthansa Airlines come 1st May. The airline has been providing this service since March 2008, but it seems that the recession is going to put paid to it for good.
Reports seem to indicate that the demand simply wasn’t enough to warrant continuing to provide the service. It is a route that is often used by business travellers, but there just doesn’t seem to be that many in Bristol and the surrounding areas that wish to make use of it.
The news comes as the effects of the recession are being seen more and more around the country. Many people are postponing any ideas of a foreign holiday, so the situation regarding a route that didn’t quite reach the peaks it was hoped to, wasn’t going to get any better. Lufthansa is clearly disappointed because it launched the route with a big flourish a few months before it actually started flying there.
Judging by the comments made by Shaun Browne, the airport aviation director, Bristol Airport at least still has great hope for the future regarding this route. He described the route from Bristol to Frankfurt as having ‘great potential’. Potential that clearly wasn’t tapped into during the year or so that it was in operation.
So what will happen in the future we wonder? Was this particular route launched at completely the wrong time, as it turned out? Was the main reason it never got off the ground because it was beaten back by the recession? Or was it simply offered at an airport that didn’t have access to the volume of people who would use it?
The only way we will ever find out is if Lufthansa decides to open the route once again, perhaps once the recession (or the worst of it at least) is over. But it could be some time before that happens. And let’s face it, if it has had its fingers burned once by this route from Bristol Airport, is it ever likely to try it again?
One news report, from Flightmapping.com, mentions that the airline may reinstate the route once we are back to something resembling a normal economy. The short but interesting report is at this URL.
Obviously the axing of this route will affect some people who use it now. Even though flight numbers have dropped a lot on the route, they are not down to zero. So those people will have to find alternative methods of getting to Frankfurt, which could in theory see them going to alternative airports. That would be bad news for Bristol Airport, which like all other airports is trying to steer through the recession as best it can.
So we may have to wait a year or two before we see any hint of a return to this particular service. Who knows, it may never return at all.