‘No flights from London? It’s not worth going there’

Sign up to Simon Calder’s free travel email for expert advice and money-saving discounts

Get Simon Calder’s Travel email

“There’s nowhere like London,” a leading airline executive told me. “If you can’t make a route work from London it’s not going to work from anywhere in the UK.”

The British capital is by far the biggest city in western Europe. Not only is the population large – the people are also extremely diverse and relatively wealthy. Ethnic diversity spells potential traffic for the so-called “VFR” (Visiting Friends and Relations) market. Wealth indicates a higher propensity to fly.

Naturally, airlines that are hungry for new business to or from the UK will launch links to a currently unserved location from London before they contemplate a connection from a provincial airport.

As a result, of all the international destinations served by air from Britain, only a tiny handful are not flown from one of the London airports.

Sean Moulton, the aviation schedule analyst who knows more about airline routes than you or I ever will, can count the destinations served from the UK but without a London link on the fingers of one hand.

Want to fly to Cuba? You are a couple of decades too late. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the Caribbean’s largest island was ridiculously well connected. Cubana, the national airline, had daily flights from London to Havana plus a weekly service from Manchester. Virgin Atlantic joined the fray with a link from Gatwick. These scheduled flights were supplemented by charters from a range of UK airports to Holguin – serving resorts in the east of the island and Varadero, the main package destination, a short way east of Havana.

By the start of 2024, the options had shrunk to a single charter on Tui from Manchester to Varadero. Anyone hoping to fly direct to Cuba from the UK – and thus avoid the hell of a connection in Paris CDG on Air France or Madrid on Iberia – must head to the northwest England airport. But hurry: the last flight is on 21 April, after which the last bastion of state communism in the West will no longer have a direct flight from the UK.

Next up: the Faroe Islands. When I flew to this Danish Atlantic archipelago, roughly halfway between Scotland and Iceland, the only UK link was from Aberdeen. This has now moved to Edinburgh. But you will need to cross it off your list come summer: for the three months of June, July and August, the Faroes carrier Atlantic Airways will have a twice-weekly link from Gatwick.

The remaining three are all in Europe, and all connected by Ryanair. They are Beauvais in northern France, Charleroi in Belgium and Trapani in western Sicily. And I think I can explain why things are as they are.

Trapani: Sicily used to be a pain to reach. In the late 1990s I flew out to Palermo and back from Catania via Milan and Rome respectively, on annoyingly difficult (and expensive) flights on Alitalia. Now, though, both the two big Sicilian cities are very well connected with London’s airports. Trapani is only 38 miles west of Palermo, and I imagine that adding a link from the UK capital would simply detract from traffic to the Sicilian capital.

The final two? It’s down to Eurostar. Beauvais is the Ryanair version of Paris, though a 75-minute coach ride to a western suburb of the French capital. And Charleroi performs the same role for Brussels. Both airports have a market for links from places outside London – primarily Manchester, though Birmingham is joining the Beauvais crowd next month. But don’t expect a Stansted-Beauvais hop any time soon.

Perhaps it is time to rebalance UK aviation to make it less dependent on the capital.