The vagaries of budget airline timetables and routes are bringing property investors down to earth as routes are cut or diverted.
Many expats and second homers buy property in Europe based on the travel factor – and in most cases that means the door-to-door flight times by budget airlines like EasyJet and Ryanair.
However, rising fuel costs, airport taxes and stretched budgets mean the number of passengers is dropping, and the airlines are responding by chopping and changing flight times and routes in a bid to maintain their profits.
Many property people who chose to live or relax in a holiday home that was served by a cheap flight now find that scrapped routes mean they have long and expensive journeys to their place in the sun.
Crash landing
In some cases, property prices are knocked by a once easy-to-reach location is now isolated in a far flung corner of a foreign land.
Nicholas Blair, with a holiday home in the Loire region of western France, bought partly because Ryanair had regular flights to Nantes from Leicester, near his home. However, the service stopped last year.
“It used to take us four hours door to door flying from East Midlands airport, but now we either have to fly to Dublin and change flights or go to Limoges, hire a car and drive, which makes it so much more inconvenient and much more expensive. One of the reasons we bought the property was because of the convenient and cheap travel to it,” Blair told Reuters.
Another key airport that was dropped from budget air travel was Carcassonne, Southern France. – now holiday home owners have to trek an hour to Perpignan and take Flybe to Southampton or Ryanair to London – which adds hours to a journey if you live north of Birmingham.
Spanish airports to close
Spain is likely to suffer the most as the government plans to close 20 out of 47 state-run airports as part of austerity cuts.
Many handle less than 10,000 passengers a month and have struggled to make any money despite huge government hand-outs.
Huesca, in northern Spain is hailed as the “gateway to the Pyrenees”, but seems to be a route few people use.
Just 3,000 passengers used the airport in 2011. The terminal and facilities are open all-year, but flights only land in the winter to bring skiers.
Winners seem to be East European destinations, with budget airlines opening new routes to Gdansk; Poland, Riga, Latvia; and Budapest, Hungary in 2012.
