HS Turku | “Finnair’s bus connection is ridiculous” – Those who commute to work around the world delay the end of the flight route

Carinanian Kalle Fontell, 50, says that he has been using the flight connection between Turku and Helsinki for business trips since 2004. Currently, flights are made every five to six years.

“Some colleagues use the connection two or three times a month,” says Fontell.

Finnair announced earlier in April that it would stop flying between Turku and Helsinki from May 1. The airline cited the route’s poor profitability and relatively large emissions. Flights between Tampere and Helsinki will also be cancelled.

Fontell has not heard of a single case where the flight ended in Helsinki, but the journey continues all the way from there.

Fontelli’s typical work trip starts with a six o’clock morning flight from Turku to Helsinki and continues from there to Central Europe. We return home on a midnight flight from Helsinki to Turku. You can stay one or two nights in between, but early departure and late arrival is the most common way of commuting.

Finnair replaces the flights with bus routes lasting about a couple of hours. Traveling by bus therefore shortens the night’s sleep of commuters from both ends.

Mayor of Turku Minna Arve (kok) opposed the decision to end the 25-minute long flights between the cities already fresh after the decision. Arve emphasized that the flight from Turku is by no means only to Helsinki, but the journey continues from Helsinki-Vantaa airport to the world. The mayor criticized Finnair’s reliability on the route and said the unprofitability was due to the company’s own actions.

Read more: According to Finnair, the emissions from the Turku flights were completely absurd – the Mayor rejects the company’s arguments

Fontell agrees with mayor Arve’s claim that Finnair has been unreliable on the Turku-Helsinki route. Fontell and many other respondents to the Helsingin Sanam survey say that flight delays and cancellations have increased in recent years, which is why they switched to using their own car, like Arve.

The respondents note that with more reliable operation, the route’s occupancy rate could have been better. In previous years, when the route was more reliable, the occupancy rate was better, according to Fontelli.

Fontell is considering switching to Sas flights to Stockholm and Air Baltic’s connection to Riga. In the future, he will travel to Helsinki-Vantaa with his own car or carpool.

HS asked from readers, what kind of effects Finnair’s decision has. There were dozens of responses to the survey. The quotes in the story are answers to the survey. With a few exceptions, the respondents stated that they live in the Turku region.

The identity of the defendants presented in the story is known to the editor.

Almost all of the respondents who use the route regularly criticized the decision to discontinue it. Based on the answers, the route is mainly used for work travel, which continues as a flight from Helsinki-Vantaa onwards.

The bus leaving from Turku at 4 am is not considered a viable alternative to the 6 am flight to Turku if you have to work during the day.

Finnair’s decision is a big disappointment. I fly a lot for my work, and the morning flight from Finland to Europe is a business-critical connection. The end of the flights means that I have to go to the Helsinki airport hotel the night before. The bus connection offered by Finnair at four in the morning is ridiculous, it practically means waking up at three in the morning. Nothing comes from work when you are tired. The recent low utilization rate on Turku flights has been caused precisely by Finnair’s own erratic operations. Female, 44.

There was also enough understanding for Finnair’s decision, although mostly from those who rarely use the route or have already given up using it earlier. One respondent, who calls himself a commuter, described flying on a short route as “embarrassing”, because bus and train connections work between cities.

It makes no sense to take a 25-minute flight when the connection from the city center to Helsinki-Vantaa takes two hours on Finnair’s own bus. There will hardly be a very big difference in travel time, probably for the better for most. I personally avoid flying for climate reasons, but on the rare occasion that I fly, I think it’s extremely good that the Turku-Helsinki connection is by bus and not by the much more polluting ATR propeller plane. Male, 35.

The respondents were worried about how international guests of companies in the area will get there in the future.

International business leaders will not come to Turku in the future, if connections from Helsinki to Turku do not work by air. The state airline’s actions should be guided by the needs of the business world; it feels like they are not really understood. On the other hand, the impact on the individual air passenger from Turku is small, as connections to the world work well through Sas and Stockholm, while there are no guarantees that Finnair’s flights will work. Female, 46.

In the answers was required to improve public transport connections from Turku to Helsinki-Vantaa airport. In a previous interview, Mayor Arve described the public transport connections in Turku as “really bad”.

At such short intervals, you have to learn to use land connections. All that is needed is renovation work, additional tracks and a direct rail connection from the main railways in Turku, Tampere and Lahti to Helsinki–Vantaa airport. In Turku, Tampere or wherever, you could also do check-in for the plane and the luggage could take its own route from the train to the plane and from the plane to the train. Male, 53.

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