This week the airline announced that it was going to revive the route in May after pulling out around five years ago – a decision that was taken due to over-capacity.
But now, the States-of-Guernsey-owned company say they have streamlined their offering in line with demand, and think they can entice some former passengers to use their services once again.
This is despite a 40,000 drop in annual passenger numbers on the route since 2013.
Jess Mauger, PR manager for the company, said: ‘The passenger numbers have gone down but we expect that we will be able to recover some of that traffic through offering a good quality of service, reliability and attractive times.
‘But this is just tailored to what people want, specifically to business travellers who want a day-return. There will be an early-morning flight from Jersey and a return flight around 5pm from Guernsey, no services during the day and no weekend service.’
Aurigny cut its services to Jersey around five years ago, opting to enter into a code-share agreement with Blue Islands instead. This led to inter-island Aurigny ticket holders being flown by Blue-Islands-operated services.
At the time Mark Darby, Aurigny’s chief executive, said the decision was made as there were too many seats on the route, that both airlines were losing money and the situation was ‘completely unsustainable’.
And by the time the new services launch in May, there will be three airlines flying the route – Aurigny, Flybe and Blue Islands, which runs its services under Flybe’s branding.
Mrs Mauger said the company thought the service would perform well and hoped it would serve Jersey for many years to come.
‘We are confident with what we have put forward but I am not sure about the other airlines – that is obviously up to them,’ she said.
‘We have had a spare plane, since we stopped doing our Guernsey-London City route, that we needed to utilise and we believe our customers want to fly to Jersey.
‘We are doing it with an ATR 42 aircraft which we have leased until 2020, but when our three new aircraft are delivered later this year, then we will have a spare aircraft. The service is not starting with an end date, we just want to utilise all of our fleet.’
Responding to the launch of the route, Economic Development Minister Lyndon Farnham said he was pleased Aurigny were trying to develop the inter-island market.
‘But I am mindful of the size of the market and the number of operators. Guernsey now has an open-skies policy and you have to allow for some competition and hopefully the public will benefit from it,’ he said.
‘The other airlines operating the route may have to look at their schedule to ensure that it is still sustainable.’
