Why don’t BA relaunch Cuba?
 

With all the new Long Haul routes I often wonder why BA haven’t tried the Cuba market again.

Virgin have moved their Havana route from LGW to LHR and have already increased it to 3x weekly. TUI also serve Varadero from Manchester. Previously, Thomas Cook flew to Cuba too.

It seems a real missed opportunity, especially for BA Holidays.

I guess this route would be a LGW candidate, however the densified 777s are probably too big for the route.

Probably decided it's not worth going head to head with Virgin given the clientele.

The question has been discussed in some other threads like the route speculation thread. Don’t think much has changed since.

I suspect things might have been quite different if current US policy weren’t “CTRL+Z” on everything.

A mixture of:

1. No point in filling the plane with £300 return leisure passengers and no cargo at the cost of a slot;
2. They like finding underserved metro markets like BNA, PDX, etc. and tapping into point-to-point business traffic so they'd rather use the slot for that (and the ensuing cargo);
3. The US could make it difficult for companies that trade with Cuba and effectively force them to write down the service; and
4. Iberia covers a lot of that region very effectively already.

IB fly to Cuba although you need to go through MAD. Their J is very nice.

It's hard for BA to find slots for destinations such as Havana, Ho Chi Minh City, Ha noi, Jakarta, any Central Asian or Caucasus city when they get a one-year break-even and 25% ROIC on seemingly any US destination they can think of...

One of my wishes if I were to meet Aladdin's genius would be to switch BA's network with Turkish Airlines'.

Thanks for all the replies. I just thought that it could be a good possibility given that BA aquired all them LGW slots. So far we’ve seen no new Long Haul route since the slot acquisition.

I guess they also don’t want to face competition when they can have a route all to themselves (BNA, MSY, DUR).

Yes, but I can't use my BA Amex 2-4-1 voucher on IB!! :D

Flew MAD HAV the other week. IB is worse than BA in Y, Food in particular is disgusting and I like Iberian cuisine. The MAD T5S lounge is nice though. No lounge at HAV for OW at HAV (I was going to MIA) which is a real third world airport.

They also like to find routes where the airport will provide subsidies / cash in kind support to operate the route such as marketing and reduced landing fees etc

Pittburgh are supporting BA with $3m over two years for example.

Since they don't [or at least didn't until recent events caused suspensions] have frames lying around, launching new long haul routes from LGW would mean displacing existing capacity elsewhere [whether from LHR or LGW]. Difficult to make that financial case for a holiday destination with limited business potential while the current US regime is in power - especially when US metro areas are willing to pay for the flights.

Enough airlines (e.g. AC and AF) fly a lot of the USA and Cuba for this not to be an issue.

Interestingly enough even IB dropped HAV for a while in the last decade, so I guess even for Spain-Cuba traffic, the yields can't be amazing.

And it operates with 332, which has a whooping 19 J seats, and no Y+...

BA's don;t have any of their LGW LH fleet sitting around - if they are not flying, they are not earning! So to open up new LH routes, they need more air frames, to do that - taking them from LHR is a bad idea as the business routes they mostly serve gain more revenue then leisure routes. They can, and have wet lease aircraft to run on Gatwick routes, only BA's Bean Counters and Mangers will know the cost of doing that, but it can only be a short term solution for obvious reasons.