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more Sponsored The Independent 2.1M Followers Could Amsterdam chaos drive more passengers to fly direct? - THE INDEPENDENT
“Persistent snow is expected tomorrow morning, combined with a strong southerly to southeasterly wind. KLM has therefore had to cancel 600 flights for Wednesday.” That was the message on Tuesday night from the Dutch airline as it looked towards a sixth day of severe disruption at its home base, Amsterdam Schiphol.
“By making this decision now, we can provide our passengers with timely clarity and prevent last-minute flight cancellations, leaving travellers stranded at Schiphol,” said the airline.
More than 100 of those cancelled flights were due to link Amsterdam with the UK. In addition, British Airways has cancelled a dozen trips to and from London City and Heathrow, while easyJet has grounded six serving Luton and Manchester.
The league table of grounded Amsterdam-UK flights makes interesting reading. While Heathrow is well ahead with 24 services cancelled, other British airports are arguably worse affected. For a third straight day Aberdeen, Inverness, Norwich, Teesside and Humberside have lost their day’s connections to Amsterdam Schiphol.
You will have spotted that all of these are east coast airports, well placed to exploit the connections via Amsterdam, Europe’s fourth-busiest airport (after Heathrow, Istanbul and Paris CDG).
But when things go wrong at the Dutch airport, they go badly wrong for British travellers – especially those in northeast Scotland and the English North Sea coast, where international links are at a premium.
Since Saturday, when I arrived at a snowy Norwich airport from a sunny Alicante in Spain on Ryanair, the Norfolk airport has lost much of its raison d’etre: to provide a swift and easy 150-mile hop to the global hub.
Under air passengers’ rights rules, travellers whose flights are cancelled are entitled to be flown to their destination as soon as possible on any airline. But when KLM is the only international airline there are few options available in the immediate vicinity; the nearest airports to Norwich are Stansted (70 miles) and Southend (80 miles).
Until 1991, Air UK operated a weird flight from Heathrow to Norwich with continuing service, as they say, to Humberside. It is the closest aviation gets to an equilateral triangle: about 115 miles for each leg.
Short hops of that kind of length, which could be achieved in a couple of hours by road, are common in the US. I am not suggesting for a moment that such air links to and from Heathrow should be brought back. But the premium for nonstop flights has surely just increased, as travellers who rely on KLM seeing their plans in tatters.
Agreed, the last example of a major European hub going into freezedown (the winter equivalent of meltdown) was 15 winters ago. At London Heathrow in December 2010, snow shut down the UK’s busiest airport for several days in the week before Christmas. Thousands of people ended up sleeping on the floor of the UK’s busiest airport for days on end, and getting on for one million had their festive travel plans wrecked.
Yet the latest bout of disruption is so serious that it weakens the appeal of the “hub-and-spoke” model that has served KLM well for decades – and strengthens the case for paying a premium for nonstop. That spells trouble for those smaller airports in eastern England and Scotland which have nailed KLM’s colours to their mast. The are surely now talking to other airlines about new international possibilities – just as their regular passengers are reconsidering their options.
