Originally Posted by
squawk
IIRC, Eurostar takes 75% of the London-Paris air/rail market. Paris-Brussels on Thalys is 1h25 or so. With HS2 Manchester (Airport/Piccadilly) will only be about 1h10 from London - and even NCL will be 2h20, without further high speed rail construction, which is just about competitive. This also opens up the chance for 'flights' to places like Liverpool, York, etc.
I'd estimate that > 90% of the Manchester to London passengers currently take the train. It's just over 2 hours city to city. Why go to Heathrow if you're not connecting anywhere?
Originally Posted by
clarkeysntfc
Completely, 100% agree with this. The runway should come with a ban flights on certain routes (MAN, LBA in particular), coming in to effect once HS rail is open.
That would be good, if it were not for that fact the HS2 will not be going to Heathrow. I don't think it's been officially confirmed it will serve MAN yet.
MAN is pretty well served by other carriers. You'd have to be a bit special to use BA when going east, when you can use EK/EY/TK/QR/SQ/CX/WY etc.
And VS are expanding out to the west. Add these to the US airlines, SQ and Thomas Cook flights, this makes it even less likely people will want to use BA and change at LHR. .