Europe’s travel acceleration is a complicated one for airlines to navigate, especially in regional areas outside major hubs, which may not be especially well connected by high-speed rail — and which should therefore be ripe pickings for airlines. That’s increasingly true as carriers eye existing and proposed legislation to either discourage or ban short-haul flying (France) and hub connections (Amsterdam).

With the proliferation of the point-to-point model by European LCCs, it’s largely been established that most passengers would prefer a point-to-point trip rather than making a connection over a hub.

There’s an inherent logic there: less flying is generally better (and certainly so in this case where the experience between legacy and low-cost carriers are basically interchangeable in Europe), and itineraries that are less complicated are better. 

Further, the combination of most hub airports and their notionally full-service anchor tenant airlines is not a universally successful one, and enough passengers have had enough poor experiences that hub travel is, at the very least, not a draw.

Other factors individual to every traveller’s decision to hub or not to hub include the specific hub on offer when passengers are flight shopping, because the European hub situation is incredibly variable, with most passengers’ list of best to worst starting somewhere around Munich, Zurich and Vienna and ending somewhere around Frankfurt, Heathrow and Amsterdam. 

Since the 2020-2021 aviation restart, Europe’s low-cost carriers have been gaining ground in overall passenger experience as well. Many have been improving their offerings in a number of ways. Food and beverage is more premium and attractive, or at least a tapas box on LCC X is very similar to a tapas box on full-service airline Y. 

Some LCCs are even working hub operations of their own. Eurowings’ offers connections, including over Dusseldorf, while it seems like Vueling is increasingly operating as, in essence, “IAG Barcelona”, offering a similar service to parent Iberia — especially when so much of Iberia-branded and -coded flying is done by Iberia Express — but with yellow-on-grey rather than red-on-grey branding. Is Eurowings via Dusseldorf a more attractive option than Lufthansa via Frankfurt? 

At the same time, Europe’s legacy carriers could do more to make themselves airlines of choice. Relatives who just a few years ago would happily connect to fly a full-service carrier are now happily driving a little further to jet around on low-cost carriers. 

Largely, this change is driven by the simple fact that, with tight slimline seats and hand-baggage-only, no-seat-selection fares, it’s hard to distinguish the benefits of flying a notionally full-service airline if the service is not, well, full.

Travellers also sometimes have an option for smaller and easier to navigate departure airports within their region: in England’s northwest, for example, passengers can select Liverpool or Manchester, or even Glasgow, Edinburgh or Birmingham if they’re content to do a bit of road or rail travel to get to the airport.

It’s a fascinating set of calculations to observe, especially with friends and family from outside the industry who have different priorities, levels of familiarity, understanding of irregular operations procedures, and comfort with dealing with things if travel goes awry. Would this person prefer to drive to the big airport to take a full-service carrier? Would that person rather get a taxi from home to their local airport and connect?

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• Europe on track to shunt more air passengers onto rail
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Featured image credited to John Walton