American Airlines

[FlyGLA]

What can Glasgow realistically do to attract an American carrier? I assume they have had conversations with the legacy carriers re serving GLA. It must be near impossible to convince a prospective airline that a service from the airport would be better financially than EDI. The real priority right now surely is to keep EK happy. You can be certain that EDI is aggressively trying to persuade EK to consolidate all Scottish services from EDI.

Why must it be near impossible? Let's not forget that just 5 years ago GLA was served by Air Canada, American Airlines, Delta, United, Virgin Atlantic and WestJet. Add in Air Transat who remain, GLA was uniquely the only airport in all of Europe to host all of the aforementioned airlines.

Demand on that scale doesn’t vanish overnight. Passengers are now being diverted down the M8 to Glasgow East, largely due to AGS's shortcomings. Let’s not kid ourselves—the current market share held by EDI is far from an accurate reflection of where passengers actually want to fly to and from.

[FlyGLA]

PIK

Incorrect. In the past five years, PIK has not lost any of its passenger airlines. If only GLA could say the same!

Granted, it only has one, but PIK has managed to retain something AGS couldn’t—a Ryanair base.

When you consider the number of airlines and routes that have moved to a nearby airport, GLA has to be one of the poorest-performing airports globally.

[buddyboy]

What can Glasgow realistically do to attract an American carrier? I assume they have had conversations with the legacy carriers re serving GLA. It must be near impossible to convince a prospective airline that a service from the airport would be better financially than EDI. The real priority right now surely is to keep EK happy. You can be certain that EDI is aggressively trying to persuade EK to consolidate all Scottish services from EDI.

Why must it be near impossible? Let's not forget that just 5 years ago GLA was served by Air Canada, American Airlines, Delta, United, Virgin Atlantic and WestJet. Add in Air Transat who remain, GLA was uniquely the only airport in all of Europe to host all of the aforementioned airlines.

Demand on that scale doesn’t vanish overnight. Passengers are now being diverted down the M8 to Glasgow East, largely due to AGS's shortcomings. Let’s not kid ourselves—the current market share held by EDI is far from an accurate reflection of where passengers actually want to fly to and from.

As much as I agree with what you are saying re outbound demand part of the problem is the inbound demand. Americans in general terms have little geographic knowledge and only know about London or Edinburgh. This has been the case for a long time. So the inbound demand which is obviously greater than the outbound due to the sheer size of the US market naturally flows to EDI.

However, GLA needs to make more of what it has. Play to the US market, set yourself up as the airport of the Highlands and Islands, play on that. As so many on here have said, get a bloody bus to Edinburgh and play on being close to Edinburgh. Currently AGS seem to do absolutely nothing.

[Clive]

What can Glasgow realistically do to attract an American carrier? I assume they have had conversations with the legacy carriers re serving GLA. It must be near impossible to convince a prospective airline that a service from the airport would be better financially than EDI. The real priority right now surely is to keep EK happy. You can be certain that EDI is aggressively trying to persuade EK to consolidate all Scottish services from EDI.

Why must it be near impossible? Let's not forget that just 5 years ago GLA was served by Air Canada, American Airlines, Delta, United, Virgin Atlantic and WestJet. Add in Air Transat who remain, GLA was uniquely the only airport in all of Europe to host all of the aforementioned airlines.

Demand on that scale doesn’t vanish overnight. Passengers are now being diverted down the M8 to Glasgow East, largely due to AGS's shortcomings. Let’s not kid ourselves—the current market share held by EDI is far from an accurate reflection of where passengers actually want to fly to and from.

As much as I agree with what you are saying re outbound demand part of the problem is the inbound demand. Americans in general terms have little geographic knowledge and only know about London or Edinburgh. This has been the case for a long time. So the inbound demand which is obviously greater than the outbound due to the sheer size of the US market naturally flows to EDI.

However, GLA needs to make more of what it has. Play to the US market, set yourself up as the airport of the Highlands and Islands, play on that. As so many on here have said, get a bloody bus to Edinburgh and play on being close to Edinburgh. Currently AGS seem to do absolutely nothing.

The fact that GLA is not interested in supporting a bus to Edinburgh seems to show that they are not interested in passenger numbers or attaining proper market share. However we look at it, it is a great mystery.

And yes - GLA should have a major transport interlink and bus station on site with routes to every nook and cranny in Scotland.

Perhaps the new owners will think about it….

[Iain]

And to be honest, I don't think its just a GLA/EDI thing, even the likes of MAN can't attract US legacy service, BHX has nothing at all. Forget the rest of the regional players like BRS, NCL etc. I seen one of those daft memes where Europeans view the English as pisshead chair throwing football hooligans and then through the lense of Americans its cups of tea and Buckingham Palace. It might be a joke and incredibly simplistic but I honestly don't think that perception as a reality is a million miles off in terms of the outlook in the US on flying to the UK. The regions might as well be invisible.

We've examined it to death all the reasons why the airlines won't come here or they go east like sheep. People can hire a car, go with a tour coach operator or in the case of Glasgow jump on a train themselves from Edinburgh for the day and still base their whole trip through there. So on and so forth, we're up against it from that point of view.

The issue with this argument is that the factors you mention here have been in play for decades. If you look 5, 10, 15, 20 years ago, all the things you mention still applied - Travel across the central belt was pretty much just as straight forward as it is now, Edinburgh had markedly more tourists etc - and yet the airlines we're talking about were quite happy to fly to GLA and weren't dashing down the M8 in their droves!

If GLA and it's catchment is so unattractive and it's all one market then that's demonstrably been the case for years - why hadn't the US and Canadian airlines dropped GLA and moved all the routes to EDI a decade or more ago?

As FlyGLA points out above, just five years ago in 2019 GLA had 3 airlines on 3 routes to the USA and another three airlines were operating scheduled flights to Canada Now they've all gone. There is clearly another factor at play.

What's made the difference? It's that since GIP came into ownership at EDI around fifteen years ago, they have put in place a clear and obvious strategic plan to make Edinburgh "Scotlands airport" and targeted the GLA catchment relentlessy in tandem. In contrast there's been a gross strategic and tactical failure by the airport owners and operators at GLA to even seemingly recognise this happening, nevermind to actually effectively counteract it.

The only exception to this was for a few years during Amanda McMillan's time and charge when they did seem to counteract it a bit. I'm not sure whether she jumped or was pushed, but her replacement was disastrous. This then all came to head during covid when again EDI management struck the tactical masterstroke of using the break in service during COVID to persuade airlines not to restart service to GLA at the same time. Again there appears to have been a massive failure to predict or counteract this by those in charge at GLA. This was a stunning failure and I find it difficult not to see it as anything other than ineptitude an incompetence.

As others mentioned, it's almost certain there's no other airport in Europe that suffered such a loss of long haul and US service, particularly to their nearest competitor - and then even worse, has completely and utterly failed to replace any of it!

To come back to this Idea there's very limited inbound US demand to GLA, we should note that the ONS inbound foreign visitors statistics show that Glasgow's pretty consistently a third most popular town for inbound US visitors after London an Edinburgh. Take a look at the detailed towns data here:

https://www.visitbritain.org/research-i ... ds-uk-town

The fact that GLA is not interested in supporting a bus to Edinburgh seems to show that they are not interested in passenger numbers or attaining proper market share. However we look at it, it is a great mystery.

Yes, we've talked about this at length before and it's symptomatic of the wider issue.

If you look at the frequency and capacity of the bus that's operating, it must be taking hundreds and hundreds of thousands of pax right out the very heart of the GLA catchment right to EDIs front door. It's actually mind-bending that those in charge at GLA don't seem to have a problem with this and, in spite of this having been going on for about 15 years, have taken no action to counter it. It's utterly unbelievable. I can't think of another business that would permit this to happen without taking any action to counter it.

Think of a town that has an Asda and a Tesco in it and asda started running free buses from the front door of Tesco to take their customers away to Asda. Do we think that Tescos would sit back and do nothing as hundreds and hundreds of customers a day disappeared off to Asda? No, it would be unthinkable to do nothing. But that's what GLA management have done for 15 years.

We can talk all day about strategies to try and solve the problem. For instance, attracting more European flights mentioned above - but the problem is that EDI management have already run exactly same play with respect to European flights in terms of saying that it's one market and that airlines don't need to serve GLA, so it's going to run up against the same problems. How long before they do this with domestics too?

I'm not denying that there are certain things in Edinburgh's favour that help it in attracting routes and so of course, they may well attract routes that GLA doesn't have and have more passengers, but nevertheless I think there is surely an issue with ineptitude, incompetence, naivity and lack of strategic nous over much of the last 15 years from those who have been in charge of GLA. As such I think we're really a point where we need to have a change of operator - to at least see if they can possibly do better.

When Andy Cliffe came in, he talked very positively and I thought we had somebody that might be able to bring a new broom and sort things out, but unfortunately with recent events I'm getting the strong impression that he's somebody who talks a good game but is not going to produce any results. He started off positively, talking of getting new US routes, routes to China, getting new ME routes, flights to Madrid, more flights to Germany etc and literally none of these things have come to fruition. Whilst American were always likely to go back into EDI, the Jetblue and EK decisions seem to show that he and his team are still not cutting the mustard.

The one way to stop EK moving lock, stock and barrel eastwards Is probably to get QR in the door. Can they do it? I highly doubt it.

New owners fast please. To me, that's the only way that there will be any significant improvement.

[TonyM90]

I said I'd go for a lie down. I did but the analysis is just too engaging folks.

At the risk of sounding really patronising and preachy I think it would help if people reassessed their expectations for the airport. You're just going to cause more frustration and angst for yourselves and expect management to deliver things that they probably can't because of what existed before or how market conditions used to be. There is decent enough demand here to the US compared to say provincial cities in England, but American, Delta etc just don't care and see it all as one market, no matter how much we try and justify why we should have certain services we are just not in the picture as a standalone market at this point. I would love all the big US legacy operators to have daily year round service here but it isn't going to happen, not just now at least. Heck EDI is now going past just the central belt or Scotland as a whole to support certain routes, having to lean on the north of England as well to sustain more niche routes like Singapore, Saudi etc if they happen and they will no doubt have SG backing to attract these routes whether they sustain or not. The priority should be on what our peers have that we don't and that is the Ryanair base. EDI has pillaged GLA's route offering over the last 15 years and if it means playing on the fact the terminal is completely choked there and that they have lost sight of what built up their route network at one time then management absolutely should be trying to take the neglected parts of their network. Although I don't doubt the management have continuously been talking to FR, I sometimes wonder if they lack the instinct to get a bit dirty almost and take from EDI as they have done from GLA. If it involves some undercutting then so be it. Just as GLA will be talking to FR theres no way EDI and Dewar aren't shit talking GLA to the likes of Emirates.

As far as what GLA still has that EDI wants or doesn't have:

Transat - Long standing relationship with GLA, congested TATL market at EDI and large WOS diaspora in Canada. Never been any public rumblings of them wanting out.

Icelandair - Been rumoured for years they would move East but have yet to. Perhaps see EDI also as squeezed at this point and GLA as underserved.

Emirates - Now back at EDI and I think that will be who they most aggressively court in terms of taking what continues to operate in the West. By far the biggest name operator, lots of high yielding passengers who will spend cash in and around the airport. GLA could also probably lean on Turkish as leverage if the pressure really heightens and tbf, Emirates have proven to be far more sustainable from the likes of GLA, NCL etc than what the US airlines were so I'm more confident about them staying long term.

Edit: Also forgot they don't have BA to LGW since covid. I'm not sure how they feel about that given EZY serve it directly and that connecting traffic would eat into their long haul stuff a wee bit I'd imagine. Don't they call GLA-LGW the mickey express or something btw?

[Darren10]

A very In depth and informative post Iain. It's hard to argue with any of your points. In relation to EK, QR have a short term equipment change in the near future. I believe they will be changing from A359s to 788s over the winter period. I may be a little off with my time frames, please correct me if so. QR 788s are horribly cramped and not particularly pleasant to fly in. I can't imagine it's an overly attractive option for the EDI regulars.

Ultimately demand won't be as strong over the winter months which probably plays its part however, I'd probably say the EK flight is taking its toll also. This is the perfect opportunity for GLA management to capitalise.. offer QR a deal they cant refuse for and evening flight. Get an A359 on it and give EK a taste of their own medicine.

[Clive]

And to be honest, I don't think its just a GLA/EDI thing, even the likes of MAN can't attract US legacy service, BHX has nothing at all. Forget the rest of the regional players like BRS, NCL etc. I seen one of those daft memes where Europeans view the English as pisshead chair throwing football hooligans and then through the lense of Americans its cups of tea and Buckingham Palace. It might be a joke and incredibly simplistic but I honestly don't think that perception as a reality is a million miles off in terms of the outlook in the US on flying to the UK. The regions might as well be invisible.

We've examined it to death all the reasons why the airlines won't come here or they go east like sheep. People can hire a car, go with a tour coach operator or in the case of Glasgow jump on a train themselves from Edinburgh for the day and still base their whole trip through there. So on and so forth, we're up against it from that point of view.

The issue with this argument is that the factors you mention here have been in play for decades. If you look 5, 10, 15, 20 years ago, all the things you mention still applied - Travel across the central belt was pretty much just as straight forward as it is now, Edinburgh had markedly more tourists etc - and yet the airlines we're talking about were quite happy to fly to GLA and weren't dashing down the M8 in their droves!

If GLA and it's catchment is so unattractive and it's all one market then that's demonstrably been the case for years - why hadn't the US and Canadian airlines dropped GLA and moved all the routes to EDI a decade or more ago?

As FlyGLA points out above, just five years ago in 2019 GLA had 3 airlines on 3 routes to the USA and another three airlines were operating scheduled flights to Canada Now they've all gone. There is clearly another factor at play.

What's made the difference? It's that since GIP came into ownership at EDI around fifteen years ago, they have put in place a clear and obvious strategic plan to make Edinburgh "Scotlands airport" and targeted the GLA catchment relentlessy in tandem. In contrast there's been a gross strategic and tactical failure by the airport owners and operators at GLA to even seemingly recognise this happening, nevermind to actually effectively counteract it.

The only exception to this was for a few years during Amanda McMillan's time and charge when they did seem to counteract it a bit. I'm not sure whether she jumped or was pushed, but her replacement was disastrous. This then all came to head during covid when again EDI management struck the tactical masterstroke of using the break in service during COVID to persuade airlines not to restart service to GLA at the same time. Again there appears to have been a massive failure to predict or counteract this by those in charge at GLA. This was a stunning failure and I find it difficult not to see it as anything other than ineptitude an incompetence.

As others mentioned, it's almost certain there's no other airport in Europe that suffered such a loss of long haul and US service, particularly to their nearest competitor - and then even worse, has completely and utterly failed to replace any of it!

To come back to this Idea there's very limited inbound US demand to GLA, we should note that the ONS inbound foreign visitors statistics show that Glasgow's pretty consistently a third most popular town for inbound US visitors after London an Edinburgh. Take a look at the detailed towns data here:

https://www.visitbritain.org/research-i ... ds-uk-town

The fact that GLA is not interested in supporting a bus to Edinburgh seems to show that they are not interested in passenger numbers or attaining proper market share. However we look at it, it is a great mystery.

Yes, we've talked about this at length before and it's symptomatic of the wider issue.

If you look at the frequency and capacity of the bus that's operating, it must be taking hundreds and hundreds of thousands of pax right out the very heart of the GLA catchment right to EDIs front door. It's actually mind-bending that those in charge at GLA don't seem to have a problem with this and, in spite of this having been going on for about 15 years, have taken no action to counter it. It's utterly unbelievable. I can't think of another business that would permit this to happen without taking any action to counter it.

Think of a town that has an Asda and a Tesco in it and asda started running free buses from the front door of Tesco to take their customers away to Asda. Do we think that Tescos would sit back and do nothing as hundreds and hundreds of customers a day disappeared off to Asda? No, it would be unthinkable to do nothing. But that's what GLA management have done for 15 years.

We can talk all day about strategies to try and solve the problem. For instance, attracting more European flights mentioned above - but the problem is that EDI management have already run exactly same play with respect to European flights in terms of saying that it's one market and that airlines don't need to serve GLA, so it's going to run up against the same problems. How long before they do this with domestics too?

I'm not denying that there are certain things in Edinburgh's favour that help it in attracting routes and so of course, they may well attract routes that GLA doesn't have and have more passengers, but nevertheless I think there is surely an issue with ineptitude, incompetence, naivity and lack of strategic nous over much of the last 15 years from those who have been in charge of GLA. As such I think we're really a point where we need to have a change of operator - to at least see if they can possibly do better.

When Andy Cliffe came in, he talked very positively and I thought we had somebody that might be able to bring a new broom and sort things out, but unfortunately with recent events I'm getting the strong impression that he's somebody who talks a good game but is not going to produce any results. He started off positively, talking of getting new US routes, routes to China, getting new ME routes, flights to Madrid, more flights to Germany etc and literally none of these things have come to fruition. Whilst American were always likely to go back into EDI, the Jetblue and EK decisions seem to show that he and his team are still not cutting the mustard.

The one way to stop EK moving lock, stock and barrel eastwards Is probably to get QR in the door. Can they do it? I highly doubt it.

New owners fast please. To me, that's the only way that there will be any significant improvement.

EDI didn’t have the infrastructure Iain, in any of the timeframes you mentioned. If it had in 1990 when the PIK tx monopoly was rescinded then we wouldn’t be having this conversation.

[Iain]

EDI didn’t have the infrastructure Iain, in any of the timeframes you mentioned. If it had in 1990 when the PIK tx monopoly was rescinded then we wouldn’t be having this conversation.

The timeframe I specifically referred to was "5, 10, 15, 20 years ago". Given that EDI has had tx flights for 20yrs the suggestion that it didn't have the infrastructure to handle them over exactly that period isn't really credible.

They've been handling daily ME3 widebodies since 2014, so they've had the infrastructure for wide bodies for plenty time too.

They haven't suddenly acquired these facilities in the last 5 years, but most of GLA's N American route network has suddenly vanished in that timeframe.

At the risk of sounding really patronising and preachy I think it would help if people reassessed their expectations for the airport. You're just going to cause more frustration and angst for yourselves and expect management to deliver things that they probably can't because of what existed before or how market conditions used to be. There is decent enough demand here to the US compared to say provincial cities in England, but American, Delta etc just don't care and see it all as one market

They didn't see it as all one market 5 years ago though.

Why is that? Has there been some massive piece of transport infrastructure built that has made it much easier to get from Glasgow to EDI? No.

Its happened cause EDI have managed to persuade the airlines to see it as one market, despite the fact they clearly haven't seen it as that previously and in some cases have served both airports for years. It's happened because of EDI's strategy - which has been clear for all to see for years - and the abysmal failure of those in charge at GLA to counter it.

As for reassessing our expectations, tbh I think that's the route to managed decline. As FlyGLA pointed out, there is a significant demonstrated demand for flights between GLA and N America that has been relocated eastwards by some mildly crafty actions by GIP combined with AGS incompetence. I don't see why we should accept that and not look to get the traffic back.

Indeed, the reassessment of expectstions to managed decline is already apparent and also demonstrates GLA's poor performance is not just in relation to EDI, but other English regionals too.

15-20yrs ago GLA was ahead of EDI and in competition with BHX and (at a stretch) MAN. Airports like BRS were way behind GLA in service and pax numbers. Now, EDI and BHX are out of sight, BRS has streaked past us, airports like BFS are catching up and others like LBA and LPL have a bunch of international routes that GLA doesn't. 20yrs ago GLA dreamed of being like MAN, now we dream of being able to have the sames routes as BRS. That's decline right there.

[Bearsden]

To underline the comments above comparing 2024 to 2018
Airport 2024 2018 Change % Change
HEATHROW 81,919,293 80,100,311 1,818,982 2%
GATWICK 42,317,824 46,081,327 -3,763,503 -8%
MANCHESTER 29,405,815 28,254,970 1,150,845 4%
STANSTED 29,007,071 27,995,121 1,011,950 4%
LUTON 16,642,979 16,766,552 -123,573 -1%
EDINBURGH 15,140,104 14,291,811 848,293 6%
BIRMINGHAM 12,242,019 12,454,642 -212,623 -2%
BRISTOL 10,339,760 8,696,653 1,643,107 19%
GLASGOW 7,683,075 9,652,516 -1,969,441 -20%
BELFAST INTERNATIONAL 6,384,734 6,268,953 115,781 2%
NEWCASTLE 4,994,191 5,332,238 -338,047 -6%
LIVERPOOL (JOHN LENNON) 4,619,971 5,042,312 -422,341 -8%
EAST MIDLANDS INTERNATIONAL 4,146,203 4,873,757 -727,554 -15%
LEEDS BRADFORD 4,120,159 4,037,686 82,473 2%
LONDON CITY 3,460,499 4,820,292 -1,359,793 -28%
BELFAST CITY (GEORGE BEST) 2,298,886 2,510,294 -211,408 -8%
ABERDEEN 2,248,471 3,055,995 -807,524 -26%
BOURNEMOUTH 1,025,184 674,972 350,212 52%
CARDIFF WALES 868,194 1,579,204 -711,010 -45%
SOUTHAMPTON 801,454 1,990,930 -1,189,476 -60%