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“There’s no place like London,” a major airline executive told me. “If the route doesn’t work from London, it won’t work from anywhere in the UK.”
The capital of the United Kingdom is the largest city in Western Europe. Not only is the population large, but the people are also very diverse and relatively wealthy. Ethnic diversity brings potential traffic to the so-called “VFR” (Visiting Friends and Relations) market. Wealth indicates a greater propensity to fly.
Understandably, airlines hungry for new business to and from the UK will open links from London to places they currently don’t serve, before considering connections from regional airports.
As a result, only a handful of all international destinations are served by flights from the UK. do not have I will be flying from London airport.
Sean Moulton is an airline schedule analyst who knows more about airline routes than you or I, and can count on one hand the number of destinations that fly from the UK rather than via London.
Want to fly to Cuba? You’re decades too late. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the Caribbean’s largest island was surprisingly well connected. The national airline, Cubana, operated weekly flights from Manchester in addition to daily flights from London to Havana. Virgin Atlantic also joined the fray with a link from Gatwick. These regular flights were complemented by charter flights from various UK airports to Holguin, serving resorts in the eastern part of the island and Varadero, the main package destination slightly east of Havana.
By early 2024, options had been reduced to a single charter for Tui from Manchester to Varadero. Those wanting to fly direct from the UK to Cuba should avoid the layover hell at Air France’s Paris CDG or Iberia’s Madrid by heading to an airport in north-west England. But please hurry. The last flight will be on April 21st, after which there will be no direct flights from Britain to the last bastion of national communism in the West.
Next up is the Faroe Islands. When I flew to this Danish Atlantic archipelago, located roughly halfway between Scotland and Iceland, the only link to the UK was from Aberdeen. We have now moved to Edinburgh. But I need to cross it off my list for summer. For the three months of June, July and August, Faroe Islands airline Atlantic Airways will operate twice-weekly flights from Gatwick Airport.
The remaining three are all in Europe and all connected by Ryanair. Beauvais in northern France, Charleroi in Belgium, and Trapani in western Sicily. And I think it also explains why things are the way they are.
Trapani: Sicily used to be a pain to get to. In the late 1990s, I took Alitalia’s disgustingly difficult (and expensive) flight to Palermo and back from Catania via Milan and Rome, respectively. But now Sicily’s two largest cities are both very well connected with London’s airport. Trapani is only 60 kilometers west of Palermo and I imagine adding a link from the British capital would simply reduce traffic to the Sicilian capital.
What about the last two? It’s all down to Eurostar. Beauvais is the Ryanair version of Paris, but it takes him 75 minutes by bus to reach the western suburbs of the French capital. And Charleroi plays the same role in Brussels. Both airports have connection markets from outside London, primarily Manchester, but next month Birmingham will also join Beauvais’s airport. But don’t expect Stansted Beauvais hops anytime soon.
Perhaps it is time to rebalance Britain’s aviation industry and make it less dependent on the capital.