Route news: Norse drops two US routes from Gatwick, SAS launches Bergen from Heathrow

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• BA Flyer IHG Stayer says:

  6 Jan6 January 11:27

  Very timely re Norse.

  Was chatting to someone yesterday about them. He was thinking of using them to go to BOS and I said I thought they were in the process of canning the route.

  I guess the people who booked with them will have issues getting them to rebook them onto other carriers.

• Bagoly says:

  6 Jan6 January 11:56

  “tickets had been on sale from 1st April.”
  Indeed a challenge for brevity v avoiding ambiguity.
  “tickets for travel from 1st April had been on sale” ?

• ADS says:

  6 Jan6 January 12:33

  i assumed that the Bergen flights would be operating on a W routing … but from the flight timings it looks like they’re using a Bergen based plane … and according to Wikipedia SAS have “Minor hubs also exist at Bergen Airport, Flesland, Göteborg Landvetter Airport, Stavanger Airport, and Trondheim Airport”

  which goes some way to explaining why SAS struggle to be profitable

  • Nick says:

    6 Jan6 January 16:06

    That’s mainly interesting because most of their LHR and MAN flights are actually operated with aircraft and crew based here. (Well, Ireland technically, but they start their day in the UK.)

• Super Secret Stuff says:

  6 Jan6 January 12:43

  I’m surprised Norse has started Manchester or Edinburgh yet

• Dan says:

  7 Jan7 January 10:33

  I thought Norse would be interested in flying Bucharest to NYC, but a local LCC just launched the route

• Krishnan R. Iyengar says:

  7 Jan7 January 17:52

  I disagree with the statement saying, “[Norse] pulling flights [to the US] from Gatwick doesn’t necessarily mean the airline is in trouble”.

  While they seem to have learned the lessons from Norwegian’s long-haul (mis)adventure – i.e. not doing any cash flow management, being solely matket share focused without having a strong balance sheet to be able to back this up financially and sustain significant start-up losses over an extended period of time, having their finger in every pie imaginable, Norse’s cardonal mistake seems to be to have spread themselves too thinly, compounded by their all too frequent schedule changes. What Norse should have done instead of starting low-cost transatlantic flights to the US from various, relatively small and highly seasonal European points at often suboptimal frequencies of only one or two flights a week(as exemplified by Athens-JFK) at the same time when they started flying from Gatwick is to fully concentrate on building up the heavily travelled and really lucrative routes, such as JFK, LAX, Miami and Orlando out of Gatwick and Paris (either CAR or Orly), serving each of them daily, every single day of the week in summer and during the X-mas / New Year and Easter holiday periods, with Gatwick-JFK and CDG/ ORY – JFK warranting a second daily frequency during the peak summer period (obviously at better times than those currently scheduled for their second daily Gatwick-JFK service). And for a newby like Norse to succeed in the Caribbean, they needed to have established a strong relationship with a big tour operator specializing in this region.

  Actually, the way things seem to be going at Norse at the moment actually indicate to me that the airline is in real trouble, big time. I wouldn’t be surprised if they throw in the towel at the end of the forthcoming summer season, possibly selling their Gatwick slots (the only relatively plentiful slots they hold on this side of the big pond of any value) to someone like BA, possibly including their leases on the twelve 787-9s (not including the additional trio of 787-8s Norse currently subleases to Air Europa) where BA because of its far greater economic clout, especially as a leading IAG member airline, could probably negotiate significantly better terms with lessors, with these aircraft being suitable replacements for BA’s very long in the tooth, Gatwick-based long-haul fleet of twelve 777-200ERs.

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