Limited (AIL). The Scottish carrier turned to its
sister airline for assistance after deciding to go
solo. “With ybmi, we looked at whether there
was any synergy on [reservation] systems,
but ybmi are on Amadeus and we concluded
that to be too big and unwieldy, so we went
for Videcom,” said Hinkles. “But there were a
lot of other areas, like setting up our revenue
accounts department and some other back-
of-house areas where ybmi’s advice and
guidance was very helpful in getting things
done faster. They’d already gone through
this over the previous years – the trials and
tribulations of setting up infrastructure – when
they backed out of bmi main.”
CODESHARE
Loganair now has a codeshare with
ybmi. Looking at the booking gures, that
relationship has already started to show
bene ts, particularly on the Aberdeen-Bristol
route, according to the MD. Two other
operations agreements have been signed,
with British Airways and easyJet. “They
are very, very different deals, for different
purposes,” he observed. “We’ve had a
long-standing relationship with BA since
1994, when Loganair became a franchise
and operated as such until 2007. This
arrangement is around connectivity to and
from the highlands and islands. So, if you’re
a passenger travelling from Sumburgh to
Sydney or Benbecula to Bangkok, it’s very
much around that connectivity of which
London is the biggest individual part.
“We’ve also put a BA code on our
services to and from Manchester, where
there’s a growing number of other ights
carrying the BA code – whether it be
Sun-Air of Scandinavia, American Airlines,Aer Lingus or Qatar Airways – and that’s
performing very well too.”
The deal with easyJet is based around
point-to-point selling, explained Hinkles: “It’s
easyJet’s aspiration to not just sell easyJet
ights on its website, but to sell ights for
selected partners. You can now go onto
the easyJet website and book Glasgow to
Benbecula or any [Loganair] route you want.
“The bene ts will be in areas where the
Loganair name isn’t particularly well known.
In the highlands and islands of Scotland,
people know that you book Loganair ights
at our website and they’re not suddenly
going to start booking Sumburgh-Aberdeen
shopping trips through easyJet’s website.
“All of a sudden there’s a join-the-dots
natural synergy. It puts our product into a
very big shop window. I think easyJet’s is
the 10th largest [airline] website in the world
for visitor numbers. We couldn’t expect to
replicate that in our own right.”
‘Worldwide by easyJet’, which enables
connections with chosen airlines, was
launched by the Luton-based carrier out
of London Gatwick. The Gatwick Connect
programme, which binds it together, is not
available at any airport where Loganair
meets the easyJet network. “We are
keen to look at whether we can have a
‘Glasgow Connect’-type programme,” said
Hinkles, who would also like to see similar
programmes at Bristol and Stansted.
“That is a natural evolution of where
we have started in our relationship with
easyJet. It’s initially about selling point-
to-point and adding additional sales lift to
Loganair but may develop into a similar type
of connectivity which easyJet has on the
‘Worldwide’ product.”
Loganair has an increasing number of
airline partnerships which also include Air
France, KLM, Turkish Airlines and Emirates,
enabling through ticketing from Loganair’s
network to these domestic and international
carriers. These relationships with other
carriers come under what the airline calls its
‘Better Connected’ programme.
In addition to expanding at Manchester,
Loganair has been growing at Norwich,
ying as far south as Jersey in the Channel
Islands. “Ah yes, our grand excursion to the
south,” Hinkles quipped. “We started that in
summer 2017. It historically had just had one
ight a week on Saturdays for many years.
It went off like a rocket, more than doubling
the number of passengers between Norwich
and Jersey.
“We also turned all the Glasgow-
Manchester ying programme around, so two
ights a day from Glasgow to Manchester and
two ights a day from Norwich to Manchester
continue as a one-stop, same plane, remain-
on-board service for Norwich-Glasgow.
That’s adding three or four passengers on
every ight that probably would not have
been there [under the original programme],
they’d have been ying from Stansted straight
to Glasgow.” A summer seasonal service to
Guernsey was also own this year.http://www.aviation-news.co.uk 61
Above: de Havilland
Canada Twin Otter
G-BVVK landing at
Glasgow on January- AirTeamImages.
com/Rolf Jonsen
Right: Loganair
managing director,
Jonathan Hinkles.
All images Loganair
unless stated