Kiwirob wrote:MalevTU134 wrote:Kiwirob wrote:
CPH is the long haul hub, KLM mange to fill multiple daily flights to AMS from Stavanger, Bergen, Alesund, Trondheim & Kristiansand. Rumour has it that they will start flying to Molde next year.
From Molde I can only fly to Oslo with SK and Bergen with WF.
Just so that people understand what we're talking about here, to give some context: Molde is a town of 26,000 inhabitants, with no other towns of size nearby, on the coast, at the end of a fjord, in central Norway. At the end of the next fjord to the south is Ålesund, and to the north, Trondheim. While it still takes several hours to drive to any of those towns, including ferry rides in some cases, it's still valid to ask whether it's reasonable to demand that SAS fly to CPH from every single town of that size? Again, if you live in the middle of nowhere, you can't demand nonstops to the middle of the universe. At least not on purely commercial grounds. If your politicians decide that they want to subsidize a flight, then that would be another issue.
KLM to Molde?? I will be surprised. Don't they really have no other lower hanging fruit to pick?
It takes 60 minutes to drive to Kristiansund and about 80 minutes to drive to Alesund, that's not hours, Molde Kommune has 32,000 people, if you include a 30 minute radius from Molde Årø it's closer to 60,000, bump that to 60 minutes and you could add another 30,000 from Kristiansund, many of whome already drive to Molde to fly with Norwegian. So IMO Molde is not in the middle of nowhere, it's the administrative centre of Møre og Romsdale country.
For KLM a catchment area of 90,000 passengers should be doable for a daily to AMS.
Ultimately once Møre Aksen is completed the next major piece of infrastructure should only be a single airport central to Molde, Alesund and Kristiansund.
I'm still not convinced. As you stated yourself, it's just 90,000 people (there are literally hundreds of unserved (by KLM) urban areas around Europe with way bigger catchment areas than that), out of which many have just a good hour's drive to an airport where KLM already flies to (that's the same as getting to Heathrow from central London by car on a bad day). Why Molde? Why not Kiel? Örebro? Linz? etcetera...