With nearly 75,000 searches in the past 12 months, a potential city pair from Malmö to London has been identified as this week’s “Skyscanner-anna.aero Unserved Route of the Week” – a powerful analysis based on aspirational data captured from the Skyscanner.net flight comparison site used by +60 million unique visitors per month. “When we look at Malmö-London we talk about the Malmö Paradox,” states Helena Mårtén, Business Development Manager at Swedavia. “There is around the same capacity to Stockholm from both Malmö [115 flights per month] and Copenhagen [104 flights per month] and both routes are operated by SAS and Norwegian. However, on the route from Malmö to London there is no capacity today, and yet from Copenhagen there are 129 flights per week!”

Skyscanner demand on this week’s unserved route shows a preference towards the London end of the city pair, with a 67/33 split, so on this basis we looked at potential carriers at the UK origin first. Much of Malmö’s potential demand to London will be counted as surface leakage to Copenhagen, which is less than 30 kilometres from the Swedish city across the Oresund Bridge. In addition to this, there are also multiple airport options at the UK end. On this basis, and in order to give any potential new carrier a niche market to serve, our data elves have decided to consider only those London airports which do not have a Copenhagen route. With London Heathrow served by British Airways and SAS (both with 39 weekly flights), London Gatwick flown by Norwegian (37) and easyJet (20), London Stansted operated by Ryanair (18), and London Luton served also by the Irish ULCC (daily), this leaves London City and London Southend.