November 12th - Long Haul, Low Cost Aviation Has A New Route
Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast
The Independent
3.6 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 12 November 2021
⏱️ 9 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Travellers will have more flight choices, with budget carrier Scoot launching services from London Gatwick to Singapore on Dec 16. The low-cost arm of flag carrier Singapore Airlines (SIA) have announced that the flights to London's Gatwick Airport via Bangkok will initially take place three times weekly for only two weeks, before resuming on March 22 next year, with the journey taking about 16.5hrs.
In this episode, Simon Calder takes a look at previous attempts at making low cost, long haul flights work. It's been many an airlines downfall, particularly in trying to make transatlantic flights at cheap rates work, but this new route will be a welcome addition to links to Asia and also to Gatwick airport, which has been particularly affected by the pandemic.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, I'm Simon Calder, welcoming you to my independent travel podcast, bringing you the latest news on travelling, |
| 0:08.0 | whether you're just dreaming of a great escape or actually making plans for one. |
| 0:13.0 | Today I'm going to be talking about low-cost, long-haul aviation, because there has been an announcement today the end of the week |
| 0:23.6 | which brings quite a lot of excitement and interest at least to me. Of course this podcast is |
| 0:30.4 | completely free as is my weekly travel email. Do sign up at independent.com.uk forward slash newsletters. |
| 0:40.4 | Long haul, low-cost aviation has had a chequered history. |
| 0:45.5 | Most of it, unfortunately, unsuccessful. |
| 0:49.6 | I'm going to take you back to 1977 when the great Sir Freddie Laker, as he later became, was introducing |
| 0:59.0 | the Laker Sky Train. This was something he worked on for seven years, trying to democratise |
| 1:06.0 | transatlantic air travel. And you know what? It worked. It was a real struggle just fighting the vested interests |
| 1:13.6 | of the existing airlines including British Airways Pan Am TWA they really didn't want any competition |
| 1:22.6 | but he brought it to them anyway and as a result of that well he was eventually put out of business and there was a |
| 1:32.2 | lot of discussion about whether the airlines actually ganged up they certainly paid compensation |
| 1:37.6 | afterwards or whether it was just actually wasn't going to work and here's's why it might not work. And that's because |
| 1:45.6 | a typical long haul flight has a lot of different customers on it. And that's why typically |
| 1:54.6 | British Airways have four classes on their long haul flights. They have first, they have business |
| 1:59.9 | class, they have premium economy, |
| 2:01.7 | and they have really these days we have to call it basic economy. And they do that because there is |
| 2:06.1 | a market for each of those. If you are doing long haul low cost, then you've really got kind of |
| 2:14.1 | two classes seems to be the way you do it. If you remember, Norwegian, which went spectacularly unsuccessful, |
| 2:22.3 | I won't say out of business, because it's still technically going, |
| 2:25.3 | and they had a kind of premium economy and then a basic economy. |
... |
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