I would love to use Estonian Air more often but the long and the short of it is that they prefer to "play" the role of a national carrier rather than act as a company offering structured transport links between Tallinn and the destinations that business people need to get to.

Of course there are those who will argue that by feeding passengers into Stockholm and Copenhagen then Estonian Air is doing just that but I would come straight back and say that business travellers are always looking to make the most direct connection with less time spent in airport lounges.

Air Baltic is unashamedly trying to convince customers to use Riga as a stepping stone to Europe from Tallinn but Estonian Air are not going to be able to tell us that they are so much better if they force us to connect to our final destination via an SAS hub.

I flew easyJet from Tallinn to London and back in February and one thing that struck me was the number of business travellers using the service. That just would not have been the case two years ago.

I struck up a conversation on the flight to London with an Irish engineer who works all over the Baltic States as the representative of a machinery company. He told me that he uses Air Baltic all the time and easyJet is the second choice. I asked him about Estonian Air and his reply was something along the lines of "they don't fly where I want to go or when I want to fly" which sums up my feelings but then he added that in his opinion the lack of a flight from Tallinn to London on a Friday was criminal negligence and must lose Estonian Air so many business travellers - travellers who are not counting every EEK, EUR or GBP when they plan their travel.

Estonian Air as a company has got to buy into the strategy of joined-up-thinking. It is very nice that they can offer so many destinations on their route map but they need to consider matters from the viewpoint of the client and where he/she needs to go. Air Baltic are answering this need for the Latvian market and by expansion they are also offering it to Lithuania, Estonia and Finland.

Estonian Air should not be displeased about Air Baltic's activity in Tallinn. Instead they should be encouraged from the point of view that if they can ever get their act together then there is a lot of passenger traffic to tap into. Let's be frank, Air Baltic is not stepping up activities in Tallinn to wipe out Estonian Air or even to piss them off. They are active in Tallinn as they see the value of being active in Tallinn - end of story!

AB is connecting Tallinn with several cities in Finland, bringing more tourists to Estonia. AB is offering an easy access to dozens of locations never offered by Estonian Air. What has Estonian Air offered in the meanwhile? Expensive tickets, bad service, few destinations, uncertainty about routes, oversized aircraft, losses to shareholders and losers' talk. No wonder Estonian Air is on its way down.

Without going to local politics at all here: I think very fair measure of how well local airports are competitive is coming from major EU discount airline companies: Ryanair and EasyJet. It is pretty clear by now that they do NOT prefer the Estonian airport due to their higher taxes per customer than on Latvian or Lithuanian by now.

This is objective measure that tells very much very Estonia is hoping to go in future: they wanna look like a Helsinki or Stockholm which means that some volume operators are never make deals with them.