An interesting report from the ELFAA and York Aviation titled European Low Fares Airline Association: Forecasting the Market Share of Low Fares Airlines in Europe.
its only 15 pages and well worth the read. But I will challenge the presumed results.
What the report fails to acknowledge is the maturity of the Southwest Model. Also it fails to consider that there will be a capacity constraint problem in Europe. It also doesn't give any allowance for the opening of the European market to non-EU based carriers.
With Stansted Airport - Europe's largest Low Fare airport experiencing traffic declines - these numbers may be hard to sustain. But in my view this discounts entirely the hyrbidization of the airlines - particularly Easyjet and Norwegian. I predict that by 2020 Easyjet will be a legacy looking carrier with full service amenities just like jetBlue and to some extent Southwest have become in the USA. Norwegian will have also LONG HAUL flights as it has purchased at least 2 787s.
Further I believe that Ryanair cannot continue to expand using secondary airports and therefore must adopt some full service ancillary service capability. Indeed just like Southwest has experienced in the USA market.
I believe that we will have had a total breakdown of the legacy GDS model and a replacement of so many options of distribution that there will be a whole new class of Air Find services. More implicit than explicit type interfaces.
Finally I predict that the long shadow of Emirates and to a lesser extent the other Gulf carriers and the removal of competitive barriers will mean a great deal of additional competition of different characteristics. We can look to the EK Trans Tasman flight extensions as a model for increased competition inside Europe. Of course this assumes that the legacy EU carriers are not successful in bringing barriers to entry through regulation.
Food for thought.
Cheers
Showing posts with label ELFAA. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ELFAA. Show all posts
19 April 2011
04 March 2010
IATA finally acknowledges LCC market
Acknowledging that that there is actually a low cost airline model - IATA has (begrudgingly) started to include LCC statistics in its reporting. Don't believe me? I quote directly from IATA's stats:
"As IATA member airlines carry 93% of international traffic measured by RPKs, this change does not make a large difference in the statistics" IATA Jan 2009 Report. I think I bed to differ. The LCC model has a profound effect on airline statistics.
Interestingly IATA seems to only capture those pure LCC airlines. They so far admit that there is only 7% of total traffic being LCC. And this is where there is a pretty fundamental failure of the IATA statistical model. It measures that notional value RPK (RPMs). IE Revenue Passenger Miles. If for no other reason than everyone else uses passengers as a measure of total traffic it is high time that IATA woke up and started publishing some real data on passenger numbers.
IATA claims that LCC traffic is only "7%" of total traffic. Given that the vast majority of LCC passengers are short haul and only a smattering of long haul traffic this is starting to distort the figures. Let me illustrate this.
The total traffic worldwide (using ACI data) is estimated at 4.5 billion passengers these are actual landings and take offs. This number tends to be inflated as it includes and counts each passenger twice. One take off and one landing. So in my opinion there are actually around 2.2 billion actual worldwide passengers. (PSJs - for Passenger Segment Journeys). If we look at just one group - the ELFAA - European Low Fares Airlines Association which comprises: Vueling | easyJet | flybe | Jet2.com | Norwegian | Ryanair | Sky Europe | Sterling | Sverige Flyg | transavia.com | Wizz Air
They carried 162 million pax last year. And this is not all (but it is most) EU carriers. If we were to add back in MENA, Africa, Asia Pac, USA and Latam carriers the numbers would swell by at least double. (WN alone is now more than 100 million pax). So you can see the share of market pax worldwide by true LCCs is higher than the 7% shown using the RPK model.
Interestingly if we look at an apple to orange comparison - according to IATA's numbers total traffic (in RPKs) was down nearly 11% for Europe in 2009. But for ELFAA airlines (passengers flown) it was up 8.7%. Interestingly IATA claims that the impact of LCCs mitigated the annual fall in traffic by one full percentage point. IE LCC growth saved the world from a full percentage drop of 1 %.
For the long term - you have to make the assumption there is a move towards hybrid value carriers - where airlines move away from pure legacy full network service carriers and pure LCC models to hybrids of all types. An apple to apple comparison of say United Airlines revenue models looks remarkably similar to say Easyjet these days.
Now I am sure that some people may pick at my numbers but - the analysis is sound I believe.
Cheers
"As IATA member airlines carry 93% of international traffic measured by RPKs, this change does not make a large difference in the statistics" IATA Jan 2009 Report. I think I bed to differ. The LCC model has a profound effect on airline statistics.
Interestingly IATA seems to only capture those pure LCC airlines. They so far admit that there is only 7% of total traffic being LCC. And this is where there is a pretty fundamental failure of the IATA statistical model. It measures that notional value RPK (RPMs). IE Revenue Passenger Miles. If for no other reason than everyone else uses passengers as a measure of total traffic it is high time that IATA woke up and started publishing some real data on passenger numbers.
IATA claims that LCC traffic is only "7%" of total traffic. Given that the vast majority of LCC passengers are short haul and only a smattering of long haul traffic this is starting to distort the figures. Let me illustrate this.
The total traffic worldwide (using ACI data) is estimated at 4.5 billion passengers these are actual landings and take offs. This number tends to be inflated as it includes and counts each passenger twice. One take off and one landing. So in my opinion there are actually around 2.2 billion actual worldwide passengers. (PSJs - for Passenger Segment Journeys). If we look at just one group - the ELFAA - European Low Fares Airlines Association which comprises: Vueling | easyJet | flybe | Jet2.com | Norwegian | Ryanair | Sky Europe | Sterling | Sverige Flyg | transavia.com | Wizz Air
They carried 162 million pax last year. And this is not all (but it is most) EU carriers. If we were to add back in MENA, Africa, Asia Pac, USA and Latam carriers the numbers would swell by at least double. (WN alone is now more than 100 million pax). So you can see the share of market pax worldwide by true LCCs is higher than the 7% shown using the RPK model.
Interestingly if we look at an apple to orange comparison - according to IATA's numbers total traffic (in RPKs) was down nearly 11% for Europe in 2009. But for ELFAA airlines (passengers flown) it was up 8.7%. Interestingly IATA claims that the impact of LCCs mitigated the annual fall in traffic by one full percentage point. IE LCC growth saved the world from a full percentage drop of 1 %.
For the long term - you have to make the assumption there is a move towards hybrid value carriers - where airlines move away from pure legacy full network service carriers and pure LCC models to hybrids of all types. An apple to apple comparison of say United Airlines revenue models looks remarkably similar to say Easyjet these days.
Now I am sure that some people may pick at my numbers but - the analysis is sound I believe.
Cheers
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