Well I swear that somewhere last week I read that the 787 was the actual replacement for the 343 and not the 330. I can't remember where I saw that but it was on a bit of official VS literature.
I personally can't see why VS would select FLL. Everything that FLL does MIA already does, so it already caters for the large cruise market and also works well for passengers doing a fly drive taking in Everglades, Keys, Orlando etc. Must also remember that at some point VS will be moving terminals at MIA, so whilst the current terminal is not the best in terms of passenger experience, it will not be too long until that is forgotten. It would be a large decision for VS for them to pull out of MIA, lets not forget it was the third route the airline operated and FLL does not really have the "kudos" that MIA does. And I do not believe that FLL would be that much cheaper than MIA, if it was then we would see a raft of carriers switching to FLL.
I think the VS press releases on the 330 give us a pretty good idea where they will be used. Cancun, Vancouver and Beijing are all mentioned in the 330 press releases. I also think that the aircraft will be fairly successful on "thiner" routes such as some of the Caribbean islands that perhaps do not have sufficient demand for a 744 double drop service. VH have played a big part in helping VS through the economic uncertainty of the last couple of years and I would not be surprised if we see the opening of more leisure orientated routes using the 330s. There is nothing to suggest that the aircraft will be operated from LHR.
MAN and GLA have huge potential. I think VH/VS have been very pleased with GLA. However there is a difference between operating to MCO, seasonally, and operating a weekly service to business destinations from GLA. MAN is calling out for a west coast America route.
Darren Wheeler wrote:
SEA is another route worthy of a visit. Not sure about Canada though. Toronto has been tried before (twice ?) and failed.
SEA has been mentioned a fair amount. The issue with SEA though is that there perhaps is not quite the demand one would expect, just look at how quickly DL dropped the LHR-SEA route. Certainly four years ago SEA would have been a no brainer, after all there were hardly any carriers operating Europe-SEA, but there has been a bit of an influx of late so am not sure if VS could get the route to work.
Toronto was tried before, once, however the issue was that the route was operated by ageing 742's and the route had only been operational for a couple of months before 9/11 happened. IIRC it was the first route cut after 9/11, so really was not given long enough to perform, I believe you really need to give a route a year to see how well it works. Of course the issue with Toronto is that AC are exceptionally strong and will take all *A members and of course now we have carriers like EK operating DXB-YYZ which will take a huge amount of connecting passengers off VS.