November 17th - British Airways new route out of Heathrow
Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast
The Independent
3.6 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 17 November 2022
⏱️ 6 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
British Airways used to fly to Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, Seoul and many places in Australia besides Sydney. BA has just announced another route from London Heathrow. But it's not restoring any of these dropped destinations ... the link is to Cincinnati, Ohio.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder coming to you from |
| 0:08.2 | lovely Singapore where I'm afraid there's quite a lot of noise around. I've found the quietest place I can |
| 0:17.3 | in the vicinity of the hotel boss but there's still a karaoke session going off to my left |
| 0:24.0 | and some considerable noise from my right but still quieter than my hotel balcony. |
| 0:31.7 | Well British Airways has announced a new direct US flight from London Heathrow. And you are not, I guess, |
| 0:43.6 | going to be particularly excited when I tell you where it is going. It's not going to Florida. It's not |
| 0:49.8 | going to California. It's going to Ohio and specifically Cincinnati on the banks of the |
| 0:59.4 | Ohio River and close to Kentucky and Indiana and that's actually the big sell from British |
| 1:07.4 | Airways is that it will be serving these three states and at the moment they've got |
| 1:13.2 | no other connection with the UK. Previously Delta Airlines had a link from London to Cincinnati. |
| 1:22.3 | It got rid of that over a decade ago and now British Airways has moved in. Now I've been tracking the new |
| 1:30.9 | British Airways North American route for some weeks because there's been all kinds of speculation. |
| 1:37.5 | Kansas City was very much in the frame. Indianapolis was talked about and there were hopes that it might be somewhere like Jacksonville, |
| 1:48.2 | possibly St Louis, even Honolulu. But we've got Cincinnati and I will just tell you what |
| 1:56.0 | British Airways is saying in order to persuade us to go there you've got the Cincinnati |
| 2:02.9 | Chile handmade ice cream and beer and also the bourbon trail of northern |
| 2:09.8 | Kentucky well there we are that's it of course it is not designed at meeting the unstoppable demand for people like you and me to go to the Midwest. |
| 2:23.2 | Nothing like that at all. |
| 2:24.5 | It is partly because the airline realizes that there's quite a lot of second-tier airports in America that will throw quite a lot of money at airlines who are prepared to start new routes, |
| 2:41.8 | and that there are also places, and Cincinnati is one of them, where BIA will face no competition. |
| 2:50.6 | There is an existing link on Air France to and from Paris, but that's all at the moment. |
| 2:57.3 | And so, BA hopes that all the people, and they would have done their sums about the number |
... |
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