Latest score: Jersey Airport 2 : Jersey Harbour 0

More good news from Jersey Airport this week – another new route launches this Saturday and there’s increased capacity on another from next year. Meanwhile the July passenger figures show that arrivals from St Malo hardly grew at all – despite the arrival of HD Ferries this year.

This Saturday, Manx2 – a relatively new start up airline with ex-Rockhopper/Blue Islands chairman, Noel Hayes, at the helm – starts flights to that well-known international airport….er, Gloucester! Initially it will be weekends only, but at the end of October it will fly Friday and Sunday evenings – thereby creating a whole new short-break opportunity to and from the Cotswolds. In order to be sure that everyone knows where the airport is, they have rather grandly re-branded themselves Gloucester (M5) – and to be fair, it is well placed for getting to lots of other places. The 19 seat aircraft will also fly on from Gloucester to the Isle of Man, thereby once again providing a link between the two finance centres.

At the same time, Flybe have announced that from March next year there will be four flights a week to/from Newcastle. The growth in routes is very encouraging and apparently there are more announcements to come over the next few weeks.

While Julian Green and his team continue to achieve good things at the airport, down at the docks, it’s a different story. July’s arrival figures are out and amongst all the positive news, it was surprising to see that arrivals from St Malo had grown by less than 1000 passengers.

Remember that with HD Ferries, capacity on the route dramatically increased. Now I know that HD have had all sorts of problems and some sailings would have been cancelled due to poor weather, but even with a few days excluded the route has hardly grown at all and the market has been split between two operators. It will be interesting to see if August shows improvement – especially as the third operator, Corsaire, started last month.