Low cost airline Atlas Blue is introducing a carbon offsetting programme so environmentally conscious passengers can pay to offset their emissions.
Atlas Blue, which offers flights from Gatwick to Marrakech in Morocco, is the first airline in Africa and the second in Europe to offer carbon offsetting to passengers as part of its booking platform.
source: Holidayextras
Low cost airline Zoom is launching a Toronto service starting May 1, breaking Air Canada’s monopoly.
The airline is also dropping its JFK service in the summer and flying to Fort Lauderdale, Florida instead. That route starts on May 22.
Making the announcement yesterday, Premier and Tourism Minster Ewart Brown, said healthy competition means lower prices. “We expect the same to be true now for people flying on the Toronto route. This is good news for a great number of people,” he said.
source: BDASun
RyanAir has raised check-in costs for passengers and baggage on all new bookings with immediate effect.
They want to encourage passengers to travel without checking baggage into the hold and to check-in free online.
From now the cost of checking in a bag will rise from £5 to £6 per bag and to check-in at the airport will cost £3, up from £2.
source: Liverpool Echo
Jetstar, the low-cost airline owned by Australia’s Qantas, has been forced to postpone the start of services to Europe following delays in the delivery of Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner.
Alan Joyce, Jetstar’s chief executive, said the problems at Boeing would have a knock-on effect to the start of its new services of at least a few months.
Jetstar had initially hoped to begin services to Europe in early 2009. However, it now expects the timetable to slip until later that year or early 2010.
Qantas had previously said that delays to deliveries from both Boeing and Airbus were causing capacity shortages. However, the shortages have allowed the airline to increase load factors, helping to push profits to record highs.
source: FT.com
The small Norwegian airline Coast Air declared bankruptcy and immediately canceled all flights on Wednesday, saying it had been stunned by unexpected and unsustainable fourth-quarter losses.
Coast Air was Norway’s fourth-largest airline, after SAS Norway, Norwegian Air Shuttle and Wideroe. It had eight routes in Norway and two international connections, to Copenhagen, Denmark, and Gdansk, Poland.
source: Chron.com
Spanish airline clickair has launched ”click&fly” check-in at London Heathrow and plans to roll the service out to Gatwick shortly.
The service allows UK and European-originating passengers to select their seat and print their boarding pass as soon as the booking is confirmed, even if the date of travel is six months away.
source: Travelmole
Ryanair has begun legal action against the Financial Regulator.
The airline is challenging what it claims is a decision of the regulator not to investigate why the Government was the only party given what it called ‘inside information’ on the decision to transfer the Aer Lingus Shannon-Heathrow link to Belfast.
Ryanair was given leave to seek a judicial review of a decision of the regulator not to carry out an investigation of the matter after Aer Lingus chief executive, Dermot Mannion, revealed on radio that the Minister for Transport, Noel Dempsey, had been informed of the Heathrow decision before it was publicly announced.
Low-cost airlines captured 41.7 pct of Spanish market share in December, up 35.4 pct from a year earlier, the Ministry of Industry, Trade and Tourism said.
In a statement, the ministry said the no-frills airlines’ load factor for the month was 80.2 pct compared with the 77.3 pct registered by traditional airlines.
source: Forbes
A new low-cost airline will soon be whisking South Africans from Cape Town and Durban to London’s Stansted airport.
The airline, to be named Redair, is the brainchild of airline entrepreneur Andy Cluver, who runs local charter company Civair.
Redair has been granted air traffic rights to fly five weekly round-trip flights from Cape Town or Durban to London. There are also hopes that four slots currently not being used by South African Airways will be made available. London’s Telegraph newspaper also reports that the airline will offer services between Cape Town and Barcelona and Malaga.
source: iafrica.com
Last summer, the people of Siena woke up one day and opened their copies of La Repubblica to discover that their toy airport, built in the 1930s by Mussolini for the air force and of very little use to anyone since the end of the war, was on the threshold of dramatic change. The low-costs were coming! The no-frills revolution was heading Siena’s way.”Siena’s airport takes flight” proclaimed the piece in the business section of the paper. “A radical transformation” is on the way, reported the article, “from fewer than 12,000 passengers to four million by 2020 with routes in the whole world. While the war of belltowers continues between Florence and Pisa, Siena is preparing for a great leap.”
The aim of the operation, claimed the newspaper, was “the low-cost market and executive flights” because the company investing in the plan, a “dedicated transport and infrastructure equity fund” called Galaxy, “has good relations with RyanAir and easyJet, the two most important low cost companies at present, and knows that the other companies are very attracted.”
But within weeks, a disparate group of people from the city and the surrounding area – a tour guide, a lawyer, owners of bed and breakfast establishments, one or two foreigners – got together and formed a committee to oppose the airport’s expansion. As the local press was uniformly backing the project they published a one-off magazine stating the case against. And when they held a demonstration in November, close to 3,000 people in this city of 60,000 turned out to join them.
source: The Independent
