British Airways is set to further grow its London City airport operation with its CityFlyer subsidiary after recently launching daily flights to Nice.
The carrier will launch three new routes to Amsterdam, Barcelona and Warsaw on 6 May, increasing the BA network to nine destinations from London City airport.
BA CityFlyer managing director Peter Simpson, speaking during the inaugural flight to Nice, notes the carrier has barely been operating for one year.
BA CityFlyer has continued operating all of BA’s RJ100s since March 2007, when the subsidiary was created to take over the London City operations from BA Connect. BA Connect was sold at the same time to UK carrier Flybe, but the RJ100s and London City route which BA has been growing over the last year, were excluded from the deal.
“We obtained our AOC within 72 days and kept BA routes to Edinburgh, Frankfurt, Madrid and Milan. Since March this year we have added two routes to Glasgow and Zurich,” he says.
BA CityFlyer is also increasing frequency to Zurich to five flights a day.
“We are sticking to our business model to fly point to point services and concentrate on business routes. We continue to look at opportunities to commence further new flights late this summer,” he says.
“We are equally recognising leisure travellers out of City airport,” he comments. He says business passengers currently account for 80% of total passenger and leisure traffic is the remaining 20%.
“My expectation is over the next three years business traffic will migrate to between 70% and 75% of total traffic,” he adds.
Source: flightglobal.com's sister premium news site Air Transport Intelligence news
Source: FlightGlobal.com
