Flybe is reporting a 27 per cent increase in passenger figures for December over the same period last year, driven by capacity increases and continued strong organic growth.

According to the airline, its continued growth in passenger figures also reflects a growing trend in domestic travellers choosing to travel by air over train, and comes as train operators across the UK increased regulated fares for 2006 by an average of 4%.

Flybe offers a total of 82 domestic routes from 19 bases and operates over 96,000 flights a year.

Mike Rutter, Chief Commercial Officer, Flybe comments: “With train companies seeing it as their right to aggressively increase fares on an annual basis and in no relation to inflation or to improvements in service, the low cost airline industry is benefiting directly with a strong rise in passenger numbers particularly across domestic routes.

“With great value, transparent pricing and significantly quicker travel times, it’s no wonder passengers are exploring other options to rail.  And of course as demand increases we’ve been able to offer greater passenger choice - in the last 12 months alone we’ve introduced many new domestic routes.

“Passengers have woken up to the potential of low cost air travel as a very real alternative to rail travel - maybe it’s time the train operators woke up to the competition that poses and looked at making their offering more competitive and consumer friendly again.”
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