Eoghan Corry Talks Travel – September 2024

New hotel openings, new routes from Aer Lingus and will Christmas fares reach €1000? Eoghan Corry has the top talking points in this months travel news.

There is still time to bag a bargain to Las Vegas and flash sales are here to stay, but are London airfares set to rise? All this and more as Eoghan Corry talks travel.

Vegas for €237

A big Aer Lingus surprise for the upcoming winter season is their decision to launch Las Vegas at the end of October, a long speculated but little anticipated marquee route which brings in its contrails some of the best trans-Atlantic prices in years.

Flights are on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays, and most days are still available for €347 (some at €237) and business from €1,500. The indirect flight though Heathrow is €768. And, with a bit of luck, you can win the return fare at the craps table.

Ryanair’s winter worries

Michael O’Leary applied for 270,000 extra seats at Dublin airport for Christmas and got none of them. A man not noted for understatement, he then claimed December air fares would reach €1,000, presumably if you book at the very, very last minute.

Alarming as the seat shortfall looks this is the usual turbofan hot air. Nobody has ever paid €1,000 for a Ryanair flight. Not even to Lapland.

London waning

Aer Lingus trimming their Heathrow service by two rotations is probably not as dramatic a move as first appears. These two midday slot pairs used by EI162/163 at 11:15 and EI176/177 at 17:00 were used for a service to Belfast City and reverted to Dublin only after Brexit.

But it does show how tempting it must be for IAG to send the slanty shamrock’s slots elsewhere in an airport where it is busy to make money because it charges up to €30 per passenger in fees.

Flights between Dublin and London, the third busiest international route in the world, have long been the cash cow for both of our major airlines. Stansted and Gatwick services from Dublin are the foundation on which Ryanair’s international empire was built and Heathrow is a proud inheritance for Aer Lingus from the earliest days of the airport.

That was before the revenue model on London has gone into a tailspin by Brexit and the reorientation of Dublin’s business community away from England to the USA and mainland Europe. Aer Lingus is a significant presence in Heathrow with 288 slots, fourth in size after BA, Virgin Atlantic and Lufthansa. How IAG must be tempted to trim Lingus services further and look to the needs of their partners such as Qatar, who recently paid royally for CSA slots at the Heathrow.

Scanner in the works

When the EU threw a scanner in the works at the start of September by telling passengers their 75cl bottles have to go back in the hold (laptops and iPads can stay in the carry-on bag) it was a reminder of how slow progress has been on the roll out of the new C3 scanners.

The most discommoded passengers were those who had gotten used to meeting the new scanners en route to the gate, which is certain to happen at Donegal, Kerry, Knock and Shannon and Terminal 2 in Dublin.

Dublin’s Terminal 1 has installed just four scanners to date and the changeover will not be complete there by October 2025, by which time the EU will probably have cleared the new C3 once more.

The tendering process is complete in Belfast International, where the new scanners are tied to £10m of new infrastructure, a slow process. Belfast City airport and Cork are just beginning a tendering process for the machines that will take at least two years to complete. The C3 queue, like airport queues everywhere, is moving very slowly indeed.

Flash sales, a new pattern

Ryanair’s argument with online travel agents last winter was good for punters. When the OTAs ( online travel agencies ) decided to remove Ryanair from their websites in December, Ryanair’s load factor went down below 90pc for the first time since 2015 (not counting pandemic).

Ryanair response was a series of flash sales that got the load factor back up to 96, an impressive 182 seats filled on every Boeing 737 of 189 capacity. It was also good for the airline.

Back in 2003 there were headlines when Ryanair celebrating carrying 20m passengers in a year for the first time. This July and August Ryanair carried more than 20m passengers per month for two months in a row.

Cork gets two new hotels in one

Amongst major hotel brands, Marriott came late to Ireland but are making up for lost time.

The Moxy by Marriott hotel on the former McKenzie’s Building on Camden Quay in Cork has opened
dual-branded as a Residence Inn, with 153 rooms across the two brands that have two web presences. It will have the rooftop restaurant, gym and ground floor restaurant and café.

Dublin’s Moxy by Marriott opened earlier in the year and Belfast is under construction.

Dublin openings

The arrival of the 272-room Ruby Molly hotel, which opened near the Jameson centre in the north inner city in spring, is to be celebrated with a lavish opening party this month. It completes an impressive set of Dublin hotel openings the year, led in beds by the 600-capacity Clink I Lár hostel and in style by the luxury Leinster, with the Chancery, CitizenM, Number 59, Hoxton, NYX and Zanzibar Locke somewhere in between.

According to a study by Mitchell McDermott, 2,600 new hotel rooms were added in the Dublin region since 2023. It is not enough. Dublin needs another 3,500 rooms to meet demand, not likely to happen at the required pace judging by the most recent round of planning reverses. The Ruby Molly is exactly the sort of regenerative hotel that the inner city needs. Planners please take note.

London City airport gets a new look

All change at London City airport with a complete redesign of the departure area, a little later than anticipated, but a whopping four times the floor space of the current facility.

We are assured it will still be one of the most passenger friendly airports in Europe, a fifteen minute marvel to pass through and our personal favourite for access to London docklands and city centre.

The Pilot premium

While the Aer Lingus pilots got an 18% pay increase, the airline got a 30% increase in single aisle hours that makes lots of new destinations suddenly viable.

Aer Lingus has three other European routes new to air: Malta, Marrakech and Seville all on sale from €75. The infamous Dublin airport passenger cap, no doubt, has put others on hold.

Eoghan Corry is Ireland’s leading travel commentator and aviation specialist in Ireland, as well as being a historian, author and broadcaster. He has extensively travelled as a travel journalist and has been a speaker and moderator at tourism and aviation conferences including the World Tourism Forum, Tourism Ireland and Thailand Tourism.