This article is from page 3 of the 2008-02-05 edition of The Clare People. OCR mistakes are to be expected so download the original SWF or the rendered page 3 JPG
NO AER Lingus flight between Bel- fast and Heathrow is booked out be- tween now and the end of the month, despite some seats being offered at eee
Airline boss, Dermot Mannion said last week that the airline’s bookings on the Belfast routes have improved, although no official figures are yet available for the Belfast/Heathrow route.
After a slow December for the air-
line flying from Belfast Internation- al, with just over one quarter of the Seats full, Mannion said the airline had “a good January in Belfast and the figures are improving al the time. The Aer Lingus brand has now been brought to the attention of the entire public in Northern Ireland and we’ve been very well received. These are very early days.”
The airline boss was speaking at the launch of its partnership with US budget carrier JetBlue. The deal will allow customers to book JetBlue’s 40
routes across the US on the Irish car- rier’s website and vice versa.
The service will be available on both airline’s websites from April One
Mannion said he is “confident” that the new service between Belfast and Heathrow will prove a success.
But customers wishing to fly from the Belfast airport to Heathrow in the slot which replaced the Shannon/ Heathrow flight can find availability any day this month, indicating that none of the flights are fully booked.
Mannion said that the partnership with JetBLue will “bring Dublin as a destination and Shannon as a des- tination to a very large database of customers that we don’t have access to at the moment.”
Aer Lingus pulled it’s Shannon to Heathrow flights last month, despite a huge swell of opposition to the move from the business community and the travelling public.
The airline said that moving the routes was a commercial decision, despite the fact that the route was
well supported out of Shannon and profitable.
But there has been some specula- tion that the decision might be recon- sidered in light of the slow take-up on the route out of Belfast.
According to figures published in a national newspaper last week, fllights from Belfast to Amsterdam took off in December with just 27 per cent of the seats filled, Aer LIngus Belfast to Barcelona flights had 44 per cent of seats filled and the Geneva route sold 39 per cent of seats.