GENEVA / ZURICH, SWITZERLAND – Airline Swiss announced Tuesday 27 March that it will be increasing long haul flight fares 2 April, by CHF10-30 in economy class and CHF50-100 in business, for flights from Switzerland.
Changes in the market account for the price hikes, says the company, which notes that first class fares and special offers are not affected.
EasyJet confirmed Monday that it will begin a trial of allocating seats on five lines, possibly including Geneva, in April. The plan was announced last December, but losses in the airline industry have put some plans on hold.
Customer approval up as on-time arrivals rise by 13% in year
Easyjet comes into Geneva near the Saleve; it remains Geneva's busiest carrier
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – Easyjet ended its year 30 September with a good year in Switzerland and overall customer approval up strongly, in large part because of a 13 percent increase in on-time arrivals.
The company also announced when it issued its financial report covering the period, published in mid-November, that it will begin trialling assigned seating in Spring 2012, as part of its push to increase customer approval ratings.
It has not provided details about the routes or flights or how the new seating system will work.
Passenger numbers for the company as a whole rose nearly 12 percent, and 56 percent of customers are now outside the United Kingdom.
On-time arrivals rose from 66 percent at the end of September 2010 to 79 percent on average for the following 12 months, but Q4, which ended 30 September, showed an 85 percent on-time rate.
The company carried 7.7 million passengers in Switzerland, it told Swiss news agency ATS, almost exactly the same number as the population of Switzerland, during the period.
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – Easyjet is adding three new cities in southern Europe to its 2012 summer flight schedule: Catania, Sicily in Italy, Athens, Greece and Venice, Italy.
The first will be at least twice a week and the other two three times a week, starting 18 April 2012.
easyJet in Geneva
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - The number of passengers travelling on easyJet grew by 11.6 percent in the past six months, but the airline’s growing popularity was not enough to stem losses due to fuel price increases. The company 10 May published half-year results.
Load factor was a healthy 84.6 and 59 percent of the 23.9 million passengers now originate outside the UK. The airline is Geneva’s largest, with 36 percent of the airport’s traffic.
The pre-tax loss was £153 million, compared to £78m in the previous six months, due to steeper fuel prices and passenger taxes: “Fuel unit cost increase accounts for £43 million and increased passenger taxation accounts for £21 million of the £74 million increase in pre-tax loss compared with the prior year,” the company’s statement notes.
easyJet says it has now sold nearly half of its summer seats.
easyJet is Geneva's largest carrier, with Swiss in second place
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - Winter is just around the corner, if easyJet is to be believed, or at least cheap Christmas-time airfares.
The low-cost carrier, Geneva’s largest airline by passenger carried, has just sent out word that it’s winter season tickets are now on sale.
The period covers Christmas and the winter ski season, with tickets available to March 2012.
Cointrin airport, Geneva
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Geneva appeared for a few short years to be of only marginal interest to airlines, after the demise of Swiss in 2002. That has changed and travellers to and from Geneva are now being wooed by airlines, who are offering more destinations. The latest wrinkle in this saga is something of a price war, with BA (British Airways) offering a new lowest price guarantee.
EasyJet stepped into the gap left by Swiss when it announced in 2007 that it was reducing long-haul flights from Geneva, obliging travellers to go via Zurich. The number of flights to several destinations, including London, briefly dipped before the low-cost airline began to build up its Geneva presence.
British Airways Friday 25 March announced that it is offering a guarantee of the lowest price on flights from Geneva to Britain, for Swiss residents who reserve online. The deal is part of a larger “price promise” for BA flights, effective immediately. It is a clear bid to fight the easyJet domination of Swiss airports, particularly Geneva, where it has 36 percent of passenger traffic, and Basel, where it accounts for 45 percent of passengers.
EasyJet has 32 percent of the airport’s passenger traffic, much of that between the UK and Switzerland.
Earlier in the week Swiss announced that it is stepping up the number of codeshare flights with its sister airline Edelweiss and when the new summer schedule starts 27 March it will offer shared flights to Pristina, Heraklion, Rhodes, Kos, Las Palmas, Tenerife, Mykonos, Santorini, Larnaca and Sharm el-Sheikh. It earlier announced that it is increasing connections with Athens to two flights a day and also adding several Basel and Zurich flights to a number of destinations (details).
Easyjet and the Saleve near Geneva
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Easyjet, which easily leads the pack at Geneva’s Cointrin Airport, where it has 36 percent of the traffic, saw the number of its passengers flying of out Switzerland rise by 13.7 percent in 2010.
The company had 4.3m departures from Geneva and 1.9m from Basel, where it accounts for 45 percent of the airport’s traffic.
Numbers were up despite numerous delays, some but not all of which were due to natural disasters such as heavy snow and volcanic ash.
Loading Easyjet bags at Geneva's Cointrin Airport
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) -Geneva’s Cointrin International Airport posted a record number of passengers in 2010 despite discouraging factors such as economic gloom, skies gray with ash, runways thick with snow, strikes in neighbouring countries and even overweight planes. Some 11.9 million passengers used the airport, a 4.9 percent increase, and cargo traffic rose by nearly 33 percent to some 560 million tons.
The increases are surprising given both the many constraints and the small increase in the number of flights, up 2.74 percent, from 172,671 flights in 2009 to 177,400 in 2010.
Easyjet easily largest Geneva airline
Easyjet was the heavyweight at the airport in 2010, with 36 percent of the traffic, while Swiss was number two with 15 percent. Easyjet’s passenger traffic grew by 8.38 percent while Swiss traffic rose by 21.98 percent, reflecting the company’s commitment to build better routes for Geneva passengers.
Easyjet has been in the news for the past three days as the story has made media rounds about a December flight from Birmingham to Geneva, delayed while the staff worked to convince the 30-plus last passengers to board that they had to leave the plane because it was too heavy to take off. Some media have reported that they were threatened with arrest if they refused to leave the plane.
How airplanes are weighed
A golden rule of flying is that you cannot take a commercial plane into the air if it is overweight, but Easyjet says it is investigating how or why the 11 ton over-fueling occurred. Airliners are too big to simply roll onto scales as they head out of their berths, but their weight is routinely calculated. Eurocontrol, a European air safety organization, told GenevaLunch that the maximum takeoff weight (MTOW) can vary per aircraft but also per flight. Takeoff weight is a calculation of dry operating weight + payload + fuel on board – taxi fuel.
“Commonly in aviation when talking about MTOW we mean the structural takeoff weight,” says a spokesperson. “This MTOW will be found in the aircraft manuals and official papers. It can sometimes be lowered due to several parameters such as lengths of the runway or atmospheric pressure or altitude.”
New Geneva connections, more seats in the works for 2011
Several new connections have been announced recently for Geneva: Easyjet is adding Mykonos in Greece, Lot is adding three morning flights for Warsaw, Poland and Emirates is adding daily Dubai flights. Lufthansa is moving to “thinner seats” to add more seats.
Easyjet at Cointrin airport, Geneva
(video interview) Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - Easyjet Monday 6 September published its figures for August, showing a healthy increase of 8.4 percent compared to August 2009: more than 5.2 million passengers. The upbeat numbers follow close on the heels of a series of critical media headlines in recent weeks because of the number of flights delayed or cancelled.
The company’s Swiss CEO, Jean-Marc Thevenaz, talking to Swiss television station TSR Sunday, apologized for the company’s poor arrival time record in recent weeks. “We are taking measures—we are to some extent a victim of our own success,” he says, with flights 90 percent full from Geneva. Easyjet says it accounts for 50 percent of Cointrin airport’s passengers, and its high number of flights and their frequency has aggravated a situation sparked by “an exceptional year”. Thevenaz says that for the past 15 years the company has had to cope with, on average, eight days a year of problems caused by strikes or bad weather. In the first eight months of 2010 that number has been 48 days, with a winter with an unusual amount of snow in Geneva, followed by the volcanic ash cloud problems.
Read more…
Easyjet at Cointrin airport, Geneva
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Easy Jet is hoping to reproduce its success with London-Tel Aviv flights when it begins operating Geneva-Tel Aviv Monday 30 August, with the first low-cost flights between the two countries. The company began its UK-Israel flights in January and has since flown 100,000 passengers. In October it will increase flights from six to seven days a week between London and Tel Aviv.
Three flights, to Barcelona, London and Milan, were cancelled and several others delayed in Athens Sunday evening when Greek air traffic controllers went on a mini-strike, providing only minimal coverage after a Friday court ruling that a 48-hour strike would be illegal, reports ats/Le Nouvelliste. The cancelled flights to Spain and the UK were Easyjet’s.
Easyjet flight coming into Geneva, Saleve in the background
London, England (GenevaLunch) – EasyJet, one of the airlines hardest hit by ash cloud bans, has come up with a detector that could allow pilots to spot too much ash and change course. Britain’s Civil Aviation Authority says it is “happy an airline appeared to have found a technical solution, and, although it was not endorsing the product, it would do what it could to help certification,” reports the BBC.
The new system, called Avoid, for Airborne Volcanic Object Identifier and Detector, is described in a press release issued Friday 4 June by easyJet:
The system, essentially a weather radar for ash, was created by Dr Fred Prata of the Norwegian Institute for Air Research (NILU). AVOID is a system that involves placing infrared technology onto an aircraft to supply images to both the pilots and an airline’s flight control centre.
These images will enable pilots to see an ash cloud up to 100 km ahead of the aircraft and at altitudes between 5,000ft and 50,000ft. This will allow pilots to make adjustments to the plane’s flight path to avoid any ash cloud. The concept is very similar to weather radars which are standard on commercial airliners today.
EasyJet is Geneva’s top airline in terms of passenger traffic.
Flights from Aberdeen airport in Scotland have been suspended and more disruptions are expected as a cloud of volcanic ash moves from Iceland towards British air space, notably towards Scotland. The cloud of ash is then expected to head south. The ash can cause problems for aircraft engines. EasyJet has issued a warning to passengers that major disruptions are possible Thursday 15 April. Norway cancelled flights Wednesday over safety concerns due to the ash. The Eyjafjallajokull glacier’s volcano erupted this week for the second time in four weeks, causing rivers to rise by three metres.
Links to other sites: BBC, Bloomberg/Business Week, easyJet, South Coast Today
Geneva's Cointrin International Airport, departure lounge
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – The spring schedule for Cointrin Airport in Geneva went into effect Sunday 28 March with several companies adding flights and two near airlines coming to Geneva. Ukraine Int’l offers three flights a week to Kiev, a new destination for Geneva. And Twin Jet has 10 flights a week to Milan’s Malpensa Airport.
Among the destinations added or increased:
An Easyjet flight over the Saleve, near Geneva
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – An easyJet flight from Geneva to Nice 11 December landed safely after the 144 passengers spent 70 extra minutes in the air and were shown the brace position to prepare for a landing with an unsafe right main gear, Aviation Herald reports.
The pilots aborted the initial approach to Nice Airport, then tried two more times to get the gear down properly before “a low approach suggested all gear was down.”
EasyJet remained profitable, but with a 50 percent fall to £54.7m. Revenues were up 13 per cent to £2.67 billion for the year ending 30 September 2009. The low-cost company was hit hard by its hedges on fuel prices, which it bought when fuel was higher. The Financial Times notes that “Although the price of oil has fallen from a high of $147.27 in July 2008 to about $80 a barrel this month, EasyJet’s locked-in hedges caused an “adverse variance to market rates” of about £330m for the full year.”
Links to other sites: EasyJet, Financial Times, Guardian, UK
EasyJet and Geneva area's Saleve
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - EasyJet is one of three airlines in Spain that face strikes on certain days in August in Spain. EasyJet’s Spanish staff plan to strike 15, 22 and 29 August and say the strikes will affect flights, according to romandie.com. The airline is one of three affected: Spanair and Air Comet are the other two.
EasyJet has flights between Geneva and Barcelona as well as other Spanish destinations.
