In one of the more interesting route announcements in awhile, Sun Country Airlines announced yesterday that it would begin flying to London (Stansted) from its Minneapolis base beginning on June 11. If you’re familiar with the airline, you’ll know Sun Country operates an all-737 fleet, and this flight is no exception, so the flight will be stopping in Gander, Canada each way for fuel, which is add an hour to the flight time each way.
The schedule for the flight is kind of interesting. The departure leaves late Friday afternoon, arrives on Saturday morning, and then the 737-800 sits in London until Sunday afternoon for the return. Why is that? Most likely it’s due to crew rest times. If Sun Country were to have the flight turn right back around, it would need an extra crew at the ready to do the next flight, and my guess is that they just don’t want to pay for it.
So, will it work? I think this one has a fighting chance. While going transatlantic is certainly a big step, Sun Country doing leisure flights to the Carribbean on a less-than-daily schedule is pretty much standard operating procedure for them. Most of that Caribbean flying takes place during the winter, when Sun Country is busiest. So my guess is that they have some room in the schedule and they want to try something similar for the summer.
That being said, there already is service on the route. Delta has a daily 767-400 to Heathrow, and there’s plenty of other connecting service as well with fairly convenient schedules. I’d say that other airlines have a stronger economy product, too. So I guess Sun Country is hoping travelers will love their cheap fares. That being said, Sun Country’s expertise is the leisure market, so maybe they can make it work.
Interestingly, the CEO of Sun Country mentioned how service to Stansted opens up good connecting opportunities with Ryanair and EasyJet. Sun Country doesn’t have any interlining or codeshare agreements with those carriers, but nevertheless it would be interesting to know how many passengers actually do that.
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The plane sitting for a day seems really crazy. They don’t have better revenue opportunities for the aircarft that extra crew costs can’t be covered?
This route eats up the aircraft for 48 hours.
There’s GOT to be better ways to generate the revenue this flight’ll earn.
Say that the aircraft did 6 segments per day over the two days that the aircraft is off to London. Call that 6 roundtrips total then.
If the average roundtrip fare on MSP-STN was $900, they’d only need to generate a $150 average roundtrip fare on those other trips to generate the same revenue. That’s oversimplified of course, holds load factors constant, and doesn’t speak to the cost of flying 12 segments vs 2 though opening up a STN operation is likely more expensive than much of what else they might do with the aircraft.
This just seems batty to me.
Gary – all good points, and I don’t disagree. I think SY is experimenting a bit here, and they don’t want to get too ambitious on their first shot. If this turns out OK I think we’ll see more in summer 2011.
A double drop, say STN/EDI might work for them..both are BAA
airports and would attract lower charges for SY. Plus of course
Edinburgh is the UK’s second busiest business/tourist destination after London.