Vietnam Airlines announces flights to/from LGW!

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18 years 6 months

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From TravelMole.com

Major new Asian direct route for Gatwick

Vietnam Airlines will launch direct services from London Gatwick to Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City this winter.

The airline will operate four flights a week, eventually increasing to a double daily service, starting in early December from the North Terminal.

A Boeing 777-200ER will carry up to 309 passengers across three classes, business, upper economy and economy.

More than five million tourists visited Vietnam last year.

Source: http://www.travelmole.com/stories/1148148.php?mpnlog=1&m_id=_rnms~s~T_

Whilst this is great news for LGW, and is the first Asian route to be launched since the demise of OASiS Hong Kong Airlines back in 2008, this to me seems like a really strange choice.

Vietnam Airlines are a part of SkyTeam, and looking at LGW it does not have that many SkyTeam airlines based there...apart from Delta (x1 daily ATL) and Air Europa (x2 daily MAD), so there is not that much option of onward connections.

Now I know that LHR is pretty much full to the rafters, but the majority of airlines within the SkyTeam alliance use LHR as their hub (i.e. AF/KL, DL, AZ, SU, KE, etc.), so I am sure that if they had chosen to wait just a little bit longer, and perhaps maybe opened another European route (FCO/MXP as a suggestion?), maybe they might have been able to find a suitable slot time at LHR that would have been able to allow them to operate the flights to/from there instead.

The reason I say this is based on Kingfisher Airlines...ok, so I know that they are not SkyTeam themselves (soon to join OneWorld I believe!), but they were originally offered slots at STN and rejected them because they wanted to fly to/from LHR...and now they have twice daily flights (x1 to BOM and x1 to DEL)...so waiting has paid off for them.

Seeing as Vietnam Airlines are only planning to operate a double daily service (I assume x1 to Hanoi and the other to Ho Chi Minh City?), surely there is no reason why they could/would not be able to find suitable slots when the time comes, and they would hold a monopoly on the route as BA do not currently offer direct flights to/from LHR to either destination...or am I just thinking about this all wrong?:confused:

I suppose it all comes down to cost at the end of the day, as they may well have been offered a far more attractive package by the management of LGW, and chosen to accept this rather than suffer the extorinate expense of flying into LHR at the hands of BAA?

Original post

Member for

24 years 2 months

Posts: 7,536

interesting.... Vietnam does not operate into LHR does it?

Member for

14 years

Posts: 949

Whilst it is beneficial to match up with airline partners, it is not essential.

Member for

18 years 6 months

Posts: 2,343

No KabirT, in Europe they only fly to/from CDG, FRA and DME.

And indeed ThreeSpool, I agree that whilst it is not essential, it is quite clear that in this current era we are heading more towards an "alliance" based network of airlines seeing as it is increasingly hard for them to compete on the same routes as each other...

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