CEO of Monarch Airlines interview: Why business is taking off at Leeds Bradford Airport

Early last month, Monarch, the leading scheduled airline to leisure destinations, announced the addition of several new routes that will fly out of Leeds Bradford Airport to its winter schedule.

The following additional routes, which covers flights until the end of April 2016, including the popular Easter period, will see flights from Leeds Bradford Airport to Larnaca Menorca and Majorca.

As the Luton-based airline company is competing with Europe’s biggest and second biggest budget carriers Ryanair and easyJet, Monarch’s Chief Executive Officer Andrew Swaffield told Bdaily why the West Yorkshire airport was chosen as the base for new winter routes.

Mr Swaffield explained to me, Leeds Bradford Airport “is our most Northerly base in the UK, and it offers access to some really important valuable catchment areas for what we would describe as the discerning leisure traveler and the core Monarch customer, who is looking for a slightly higher quality offering of great value for money.”

Before announcing the trio of winter routes, Mr Swaffield also revealed why LBA is such a good fit for them.

“We do quite complex work in the background, looking at destinations and looking at the demographics of the catchment area for the airport, and try to match the two together,” he said. “Our relationships with the management at leeds Bradford Airport is probably the closest out of any airport.”

Furthermore, Larnaca, Menorca and Majorca were added to Monarch’s winter schedule from LBA because, as Mr Swaffield explained, “these are popular destinations with a good solid reputation amongst leisure travellers and owners abroad in winter as well as summer, so it was really a question of seeing if there was demand in the catchment area of Leeds, which there was.

He added, “There is a really good quality customer base for Monarch in Yorkshire, and we know that those destinations have a real draw so its about linking them up.”

As Monarch is now competing with some of continent’s largest airline companies, these business is hoping to see signficant growth with the addition of these new winter flights.

Mr Swaffield said: “We increased our Christmas passengers by 15% last winter and we expect to see similar levels of growth. Winter is a very important development area for us. As Monarch is a very seasonal business, we tend to make a lot of money in the summer, but reducing our dependency on the summer and increasing winter operations is very important.”