vectismanpaul,

You sound like someone who is a professional in the field of Route Planning whereas I am merely a statistician and an economist who travels a bit who is simply interested in what makes the airlines take these decisions.

I suppose whethet you put yourself up against an existing operator on a route .depends on whether you feel you have a more compelling marketing proposition for a certain customer group. Clearly Vueling reached what I think is a very sensible conclusion that they would not be discernibly different on service and price from Easyjet on LGW to PMI (especially with Monarch already offering politer cabin crew and more in the way of extra legroom seats) but felt that they could easily capitalise on the absence of a route from LHR to PMI mainly withdrawn by FlyBMI for strategic and political (with a small p) and not financial or economic reasons.

Ironically in terms of how they sell the seats (prices are always discounted in the last few days before departure when I nearly always book in the low demand and shoulder parts of the summer season) both Thomson and Thomas Cook suit me better on seat pricing to PMI and have nicer and more professional cabin crew to boot compared to Easyjet. But as someone usually conveying a laptop, camera and a range of other stealable stuff I always find their 5kg hand luggage weight limit quite impossible to live with even if I have a hold bag. I think they are very foolish indeed to retain a charter level weight limit for hand luggage for their scheduled passengers when they continue to sell more and more seat only seats and less and less packages.

In terms of PMI itself there is a large amount of capacity from LON these days but far too much of it for my liking remains in EZY colours when they have no method of offering discounts to passengers who travel often but always book late and when their attitude to customer service remains poor if not nearly as bad as that of Ryanair (yet if they flew from Gatwick I would prefer Ryanair since they do actually frequently offer really cheap flights even booking only 3 or 4 weeks ahead - unlike EZY).