March 28th - A New Lease Of Life For Gatwick?
Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast
The Independent
3.6 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 28 March 2022
⏱️ 5 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Reporting for you from the newly reopened South Terminal at Gatwick, de-mothballed after almost two years. This summer the competition to Europe from the Sussex airport is set to intensify, with Wizz Air setting up a new base and British Airways launching a low-cost subsidiary, BA EuroFlyer, for its short-haul ops.
BA will also operate 35 short haul routes to destinations across Europe, Wizz Air 25 European routes and Vueling a total of 16 routes, all from the reopened South Terminal meaning that the competition from Gatwick for London's other airports could be more substantial now and will hopefully mean better travel for passengers.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to the Independence Daily podcast for Monday the 28th of March and I'm delighted to say that I'm back in the South Terminal at Gatwick Airport. Yes, this is the pretty much original bit of Gatwick Airport opened in 1958 and no I wasn't there thank you and |
| 0:23.6 | it's been mothball for the last 21 months but as from 630 on Sunday the 27th of March |
| 0:32.6 | which is when the summer season starts for the airlines anyway. The first flight pushed back it was |
| 0:38.6 | whizzair going to Malaga and since then it's been well a pretty busy site. A couple of |
| 0:46.3 | things you've got to know. First of all British Airways is coming back with its short |
| 0:50.2 | haul operation from here on Tuesday. It's going to be called BA Euroflyer. It's going to be a lower |
| 0:57.0 | cost operation than most of the, than the rest of the airline. They say it's going to be absolutely |
| 1:04.4 | British Airways normal standards, but more competitive in terms of fares with EasyJet. |
| 1:17.1 | Whizair, who I mentioned, they're setting up a bit of a base here, five aircraft, which is going to be an interesting prospect, but they much smaller than EasyJet, but clearly also very, very |
| 1:26.6 | exciting to have that competition. We're also going to |
| 1:31.6 | see Qatar Airways coming back for example and from all points of view this is an |
| 1:37.6 | airport that is coming back to life. Worth saying that it's a very confusing picture from EasyJet because, well, here we are. |
| 1:48.7 | It's something I haven't seen for years. |
| 1:50.7 | I'm at the South Terminal and behind me is the EasyJet check-in. |
| 1:56.8 | And that's because the airline has got such a big presence here this summer that they can't fit into |
| 2:05.0 | north terminal, their normal home and so therefore some flights are going to be operating. It's |
| 2:09.7 | really important if you're flying in or out to know which one you are using the two terminals |
| 2:16.0 | of course linked by a shuttle train. |
| 2:19.3 | There's other operations here from Norwegian. |
| 2:25.3 | They are, of course, much diminished compared with where they were, |
| 2:28.3 | but I'm just looking across, and their Scandinavian flights are looking fairly busy. |
| 2:42.9 | Gatwick I know was previously the world's busiest single runway airport in the world. |
... |
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