Travel Question: Why are airlines cutting their London to Aberdeen routes?

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A new flight from the Granite City to Southend could make up for a couple of recent losses (lucentius/iStock)

Q What’s going on with all the flights being cut from Aberdeen? We had easyJet to Gatwick cut in February and now the Eastern Airways service to London City is also ending. We have very limited options now.

Louise S

A I can see that Aberdeen must be feeling unloved in terms of aviation.

The fortunes of the Granite City, as you appreciate, are tied to the price of oil – and while a fall is generally beneficial for airlines, it also reduces demand (and the amount people are prepared to pay) for flights serving Aberdeen.

The story behind easyJet ending its long-standing link to Gatwick is that, bluntly, the airline believed it could deploy the plane and crew more profitably elsewhere. Then Eastern Airways, which operated an Aberdeen-London City route, said it would throw in the towel from this weekend. This was a route which was originally tried nonstop. When that failed to perform profitably, a stop was added at Newcastle in a bid to fill the plane with Aberdeen-Newcastle and Newcastle-London passengers as well as those flying the whole trip. But the extra stop pushed the overall journey time to two hours and 20 minutes, which is uncompetitive compared with the nonstop; in any case, London City-Newcastle is a difficult sell with trains taking under three hours.

Competition to Aberdeen continues at Heathrow between British Airways and Flybe, with easyJet retaining one flight a day from Luton (historical note: this was the airline’s third route, established in 1996, after links to Glasgow and Edinburgh).

The removal of the Aberdeen-Gatwick service is a particular nuisance for travellers heading for south London, Surrey and Sussex, while the London City loss will affect access to east London and Essex. But the latter will be compensated for from 12 May when Loganair starts a thrice-daily service between Aberdeen and Southend (but only two on Sundays and none on Saturdays). With four trains an hour from Southend airport’s dedicated station to London Liverpool Street, this should certainly make up for the loss of London City.

And more widely, services to and from Aberdeen from outside the UK are increasing: Wizz Air flies three times a week to Gdansk in Poland as from now, while Tui Airways adds an Aberdeen-Rhodes route from 1 May.

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