British Airways Switches Mauritius Flights

British Airways (BA) is to move its London – Mauritius flights from Heathrow to Gatwick Airport from the start of the Northern Winter schedules on October 31. The three-times weekly service, operated by a three class Boeing 777-200ER, has also been retimed with the outbound and return flights now departing 12 hours later than at present.

“We’ve listened to feedback from our customers about the timings on the Mauritius flight so it’s great we’ve been able to design the new schedule around their needs,” said Silla Maizey, BA’s Director of Gatwick. “This new timing has an evening departure from Mauritius and an early morning arrival into Gatwick, giving back customers a full day at their destination when they would otherwise have been flying.”

BA currently competes directly with Air Mauritius on the route, with the latter offering five weekly Airbus A340-300 flights. For the year ending November 2010, approximately 195,000 O&D passengers flew between London Heathrow and Mauritius with BA holding a 23 per cent share of this traffic, but with the highest yield, with average fares of more than $600 each way.

Source: IATA BSP (December 2009 – November 2010)

As the table above clearly illustrates, traffic to Mauritius is dominated by the French and United Kingdom markets, with Italy and Germany also generating a reasonable amount of traffic. The move to Gatwick makes logical sense and will enable BA to utilise its Heathrow slots on a more appropriate service. There is limited connecting traffic between London and Mauritius so the flight fits well into its airline’s leisure portfolio at Gatwick. It will also allow BA to reduce costs on the flight as cabin crew at Gatwick are employed on its new mixed-fleet contracts.

This winter, BA will also increase frequencies from London Gatwick to Cancun from two to three flights and to Tampa from five to six flights a week.