For many years we’ve often debated what is the best option overall; flying from a major hub airport or from our local regional airport.
Holidays and Breaks are something that most of us look forward to each year. It’s a chance to escape from life’s normal routine and go somewhere different, experience different foods and experiences, take in famous places or landmarks or simply to sit back and chill in somewhere luxurious and relaxing.
Nowadays, it’s not uncommon for lots of us to take our holidays abroad in far-flung places, often to escape the unpredictable British weather. This more often than not means packing our bags and heading to the airport to catch our flight.
Here are our thoughts:
Choice of Flights
The larger hub airports such as Heathrow, Gatwick and Manchester offer the greatest choice of routes and carriers. This also usually means a greater choice of departure and arrival times. If, for example, you wanted to take a flight to Tampa in Florida or Phuket in Thailand, there are one-hop options which would almost certainly be unavailable from the regional airports.
Also, due to the number of choices available, these flights can often be much cheaper than the regional options.
Transport Links
The UK’s major airports have very good transport links, whether you’re getting there by car, bus, taxi or train. This isn’t often the case if you take a flight from the smaller regional airports. London Heathrow is situated at the confluence of the M4 and M25 and has its own coach stations, London Underground stations, mainline rail stations, loads of hotels offering overnight stays and huge on-site and off-site car parks. It is geared up for lots of people travelling to lots of places with lots of airlines.
Cost
I touched on this above. A flight from your local regional airport is often more expensive than the equivalent from one of the big london airports. It’s simply a bums-on-seats situation. Because the operators can almost guarantee high occupancy on their London routes they can afford to be more competitive on price. Flights from smaller regional airports tend to cost more.
Convenience of a Local Regional Airport
This is a big one for us. We live very close to our local airport at Cardiff. A taxi takes us from our front door to the terminal door at the airport for around a tenner. This immediately takes away the need to get public transport, to drive, stay, park, transfer etc. To us it’s a no-brainer and we’ll often pay a couple of hundred pounds more to have this convenience. But, this is where it falls down, because we don’t have anywhere near the same choice as our next nearest airport – Bristol – has. Let’s imagine we have an early morning departure to our destination.
As I described, Cardiff airport – 10 mins in a taxi.
Bristol Airport – 4 options:
Option 1.
Get into the car and drive to Bristol airport. Fuel cost approximately £30 return.
Book an overnight Hotel and parking package. Cost of stay approx £300.
Option 2.
Book a taxi from Home to Bristol airport and back. Approx cost £400
Option 3.
Drive to Bristol airport overnight and book a long-stay parking only package. Approx total cost £180-£200, but red eyes and a fatigued first day on holiday.
Option 4.
Take a train to Bristol Temple Meads station, then a connecting bus to the airport, arriving 4 hours before our flight departure time. Approx cost £90.
Can you see where we’re coming from here? Unless the tickets are £200 per person cheaper we will always choose our own local regional airport at Cardiff when we can.
Most recently, we were unable to get a flight from our home airport so we took flights from Bristol. We decided to work out what would offer us the best compromise taking into account cost and convenience. This is where our choice of Holiday Extras came into its own.
Holiday Extras
Through their site we were able to find a package which included parking at the airport’s ‘Silver Zone’ parking area and a night’s accommodation at Bristol’s on-site Hampton by Hilton hotel for less than the difference in cost between the Cardiff flights and the Bristol ones. It’s still a big cost in terms of time and convenience. But looking at the ‘value’ aspect it seemed a much better deal than the alternatives. We were also very impressed with the number of other options available. Among these were car hire, transfers at the resorts, lounge access at the airports, travel insurance and much more.
The Holiday Extras process was very simple actually. We were provided with a single email containing our reservation details for both the hotel and parking. We drove directly to the hotel where we were able to check-in and leave our stuff in the room. The hotel offers free parking for an hour for arriving guests. We then drove to the Silver Zone parking area to drop off our car before getting the car park’s own shuttle bus back to the terminal. From the terminal it was a mere 5 minute walk back to the hotel.
Convenient? Absolutely! The best option? Probably not for us! We would still have chosen a Cardiff option had it been available, even if the flights were £400 extra!
