Thomsonfly wishes Robin Hood Airport a happy half birthday
25.10.2005 This Friday, October 28th Thomsonfly.com will celebrate six successful months of low fare flights from the new Robin Hood Airport Doncaster Sheffield.
As the airport celebrates its six month birthday Thomsonfly.com has provided an insight into its customer booking trends and onboard passenger feedback. Since the airport opening back in April of this year, Thomsonfly has flown over 350,000 passengers and has today confirmed a total of over 460,000 bookings.
Maria Heckel, Marketing Director for Thomsonfly, said: “Since we started flying from Robin Hood Airport we have had great feedback from our customers. The bookings speak for themselves showing the success of Thomsonfly and the demand for the service we’re providing. We hope that the new ski route and Canary Islands flights we are introducing for the winter will prove just as popular as the summer destinations.”
Customer Feedback
76% of the passengers rated their flights experience as excellent and the cabin crew friendliness, professionalism and customer care also scored very highly proving that the staff are committed to providing an all round good quality of service. The airport itself also scored highly with 70% of customers rating the brand new airport as good or excellent.
After a disrupted start to operations, due to a number of unexpected occurrences, Thomsonfly is pleased with the airline’s performance from Robin Hood Airport, in the last full week of operation, 86% of flights departing on time and 93% of flights departing with 15 minutes of the scheduled time - great result for this time of year, when fog and extreme weather conditions can impact on the airline’s global flying programme.
Why fly?
Thomsonfly’s research shows that customers are travelling with the airline for a variety of reasons, of which leisure travel is the most predominant, whether it be a short city break away in Paris, a few weeks staying with friends in Majorca or a trip to the family second home on the Costa Blanca.
Interestingly, to date 18% of customers who had flown with Thomsonfly previously were visiting their own apartment or villa reflecting the upward trend towards people in South Yorkshire owning a second home overseas. Business travel is also a considerable part of the Thomsonfly customer base and early bookings for Amsterdam show this to be a popular route.
Destinations
The most popular destinations from Robin Hood Airport Doncaster Sheffield are Malaga and Alicante - traditional Spanish holiday destinations for British people.
Thomsonfly is also flying many international visitors into the region with the majority of inbound customers coming from Spain - particularly Malaga and Alicante. A high number of the inbound visitors are ex-UK residents flying in from places such as Costa Del Sol, Majorca and Costa Blanca where they have now made their homes.
Customer Loyalty
The booking data also clearly shows that Thomsonfly has already established a loyal passenger base with over a quarter of all passengers having travelled with the airline at least once previously. What’s more, over 35% of passengers have flown with Thomsonfly four times. Pre-bookable seats, allocated seating and the ability to add elements to flights including accommodation, transfers and car hire are evidently key factors to customers when choosing their airline and flights.
Furthermore, results show that 74% of passengers regard Thomsonfly as good value for money. The best fare that is currently available is £19.99 on the Doncaster to Amsterdam and Paris routes including taxes and charges.
Winter and beyond
Additional new routes for winter to Lyon, Amsterdam, Gran Canaria and Tenerife will be starting flying in the next two months. Early booking figures show that these new destinations are popular with customers. Thomsonfly will also be flying low fares services from Doncaster to Alicante, Amsterdam, Faro, Jersey, Malaga, Paris, Prague, Lyon, Gran Canaria and Tenerife this winter.
The success of Thomsonfly at Robin Hood Airport has contributed to Thomsonfly’s decision to take low fares, high frequency flying nationwide. As announced last month Thomsonfly will offer low fares flights from summer 2006 from eleven UK airports.
Further to this, Thomsonfly has recently put on sale a selection of routes from Doncaster for the summer 2006 season including Faro, Malaga, Alicante, Ibiza, Palma and Prague. This is to allow early bird bookers to get the best deals possible from their local airport. More exciting new flights for next summer will go on sale by the end of the year.
Thomson Holidays
In addition to the high frequency flights Thomsonfly have also been operating holiday flights throughout the summer to Corfu, Costa Blanca, Costa Brava, Costa del Sol, Cyprus, Gran Canaria, Ibiza, Majorca, Malta, Minorca, Neapolitan Riviera, Rhodes, Tenerife, Tunisia and Turkey. For summer 2006 holidays to Costa de la Luz, Costa Dorada, Croatia, Pisa and Zakynthos will also be added to the programme. Holiday prices start from £179 per person staying at the Fiesta Apartments in Ibiza departing from Robin Hood Airport in May 2006.
