Earlier today I was thinking about how BE has over the last few years been agressively increasing service from the UK to France (especially the west and south), these areas have had a large increase of traffic due to the increase in UK nationals emmigrating to these areas. At the same time I thought that a similar thing is happening in Spain, yet BE have seemingly missed the boat on it. One of the possible problems might be the difference in speed between the Q400 and jets and the further the distance, the greater the gap between the two in terms of journey length. At the same time there is a reasonable market for cheap domestic flights in Spain, which are not long enough to warrant other locos like U2 and FR to bother with. One of these areas is Castille y León in central/north-western spain. Lagunair (N7) is a small operator of E145s with bases in León, Valladolid and Salamanca and flights (mainly) to leisure destinations like Mallorca, Málaga and Ibiza. These routes have little direct competition, however due to the growth in LCCs in Madrid, many people choose there as their departure airport. The area in general is underserved by airlines, so it is a niche that BE could expand, as well as increasing their spread of destinations and possibly introducing new flights, both expanding the current lagunair destinations; i.e. Valladolid - Faro, León - Nice, Salamanca - Alicante as well as connecting the dots of the two; Southampton - León, Birmingham - Salamanca, Exeter - Valladolid... This also means that through the new connections options that Flybe offers rather than fly an E195 year round Exeter - Málaga and Q400s Exeter - Valladolid (or whereever) and Valladolid - Malaga), in the winter when there is less demand, fly the E195 via one of the Lagunair hubs. This could be beneficial as by offering more destinations on a single flight, the wider the market for those tickets are, which could lead to increased loads, whilst having lower aircraft utilisation which gives an opportunity to increase the number of flights on existing routes or opening new ones. What do you think? Alex.