Delta Air Lines

[Darren10]

Trully impressive if EDI is managing to support double daily 763s for 3 days a week to ATL. Would it no be worth their while sticking a 772/359 on the route, or is it a case of frequency and better connections through ATL over size? It really is a head scratcher that AGS couldnt get an NYC and MCO service direct from GLA. I really hope the new owners start to deliver.

[Ekally1]

Trully impressive if EDI is managing to support double daily 763s for 3 days a week to ATL. Would it no be worth their while sticking a 772/359 on the route, or is it a case of frequency and better connections through ATL over size? It really is a head scratcher that AGS couldnt get an NYC and MCO service direct from GLA. I really hope the new owners start to deliver.

DL no longer have the 772

[Iain]

Interesting article on this:

https://simpleflying.com/up-to-14-daily ... mmer-2025/

It carried 94,000 roundtrip passengers, with booking data showing that approximately 74% of passengers connected to another Delta flight in Atlanta. Orlando, Tampa, Jacksonville, Memphis, St Louis, New Orleans, Los Angeles, Kansas City, Birmingham, and Nashville were the top 10 origins and destinations.

If MCO and TPA are top 2 connecting points then I suspect DL ATL might have more outbound pax than we think.

While subject to change, the latest Cirium data shows that 95 weekly departures (13 to 14 daily) are planned to the US and Canada in mid-August. That is up from 77 in August 2024 (a significant +23%!) and 46 before the pandemic in 2019. They have grown from 33 take-offs a decade ago and from just 11 (!) 20 years ago.

Edinburgh’s transatlantic development has been extraordinary, helped by the city's fast-growing nature, great awareness, and much inbound tourist traffic. It has partly come at Glasgow’s expense, which plans only eight weekly departures, down from 31 in 2019.

So much of EDI's growth in US flights has come from relocation of routes, airlines and pax from GLA. It's a stunning failure that those in charge at GLA completely failed to predict or counter this.

[Clive]

So much of EDI's growth in US flights has come from relocation of routes, airlines and pax from GLA. It's a stunning failure that those in charge at GLA completely failed to predict or counter this.

What would you have done to reverse the situation? You can’t move the castle or any of the Old Town, mind.

[atuk]

[quote=Iain post_id=13984 time=<a href="tel:1736197769">1736197769</a> user_id=379]

So much of EDI's growth in US flights has come from relocation of routes, airlines and pax from GLA. It's a stunning failure that those in charge at GLA completely failed to predict or counter this.

What would you have done to reverse the situation? You can’t move the castle or any of the Old Town, mind.
[/quote]

Promote Glasgow: culture and arts, the Burrell Collection, Kelvingrove Art Gallery, Riverside Museum,The Cathedral and Necropolis, Theatre Royal, Concert Hall, restaurants, bar scene, music and shopping, Buchanan Galleries and Princes Square.

Smarten up the city centre, focus on transport links by rail and road. Golf at Turnberry, Royal Troon and Loch Lomond, Loch Lomond and Trossachs National Park, Rob Roy country and Sir Walter Scott, Stirling and Oban.

I once attended a Renfrewshire Council workshop way back in 2012 and said how the airport should be promoted with a strap line of Scotland on your Doorstep. It got as far as Derek MacKay, then Council Leader but no further.

We need Visit Scotland to focus on Glasgow and West Central Scotland, the surrounding councils to group and work together with the airport and Chamber of Commerce and funding to attract new services and re energise Glasgow Airport; not just for trans Atlantic services but direct links to Europe too.

Go out and tell the story and deliver the goods.

[Clive]

[quote=Iain post_id=13984 time=<a href="tel:1736197769">1736197769</a> user_id=379]

So much of EDI's growth in US flights has come from relocation of routes, airlines and pax from GLA. It's a stunning failure that those in charge at GLA completely failed to predict or counter this.

What would you have done to reverse the situation? You can’t move the castle or any of the Old Town, mind.

Promote Glasgow: culture and arts, the Burrell Collection, Kelvingrove Art Gallery, Riverside Museum,The Cathedral and Necroplois, Theatre Royal, Concert Hall, restaurants, bar scene, music and shopping, Buchanan Galleries and Princes Square.

Smarten up the city centre, focus on transport links by rail and road. Golf at Turnberry, Royal Troon and Loch Lomond, Loch Lomond and Trossachs National Park, Rob Roy country and Sir Walter Scott, Stirling and Oban.

I once attended a Renfrewshire Council workshop way back in 2012 and said how the airport should be promoted with a strap line of Scotland on your Doorstep. It got as far as Derek MacKay, then Council Leader but no further.

We need Visit Scotland to focus on Glasgow and West Central Scotland, the surrounding councils to group and work together with the airport and Chamber of Commerce and funding to attract new services and re energise Glasgow Airport; not just for trans Atlantic services but direct links to Europe too.

Go out and tell the story and deliver the goods.
[/quote]

Yes indeed. But Iain was saying the airport managers have catastrophically failed to do their jobs. I was wondering what he’d have done differently that would wrest some of the tx services from EDI.

[Iain]

What would you have done to reverse the situation? You can’t move the castle or any of the Old Town, mind.

As has been discussed a gazillion times the castle and old town have been there for hundreds of years, and weren't just built 5 years ago! They were there all through the last 30+ years during which time GLA had a good number of transatlantic flights (and for much of that time EDI had none). As such, any suggestion that the presence of the castle and Old Town caused several airlines to suddenly stop serving GLA in 2019 is quite obviously not valid.

Yes indeed. But Iain was saying the airport managers have catastrophically failed to do their jobs. I was wondering what he’d have done differently that would wrest some of the tx services from EDI.

I'm not saying they should have wrest any services from EDI, I'm saying they should have adequately defended and retained the ones they already had at GLA!

I would have predicted that EDI would try to use covid suspensions to persuade airlines to move and push the one market argument (as has been their MO for years) and I'd have thrown the kitchen sink at defending those airlines and routes and stopping them moving. I'm
not aware of another airport in Europe that contrived to lose 5 airlines serving 5 transatlantic routes all at once to its greatest competitor, so that would suggest that avoiding that happening is probably an achievable goal for any competent management team.

1 or 2 might've been unavoidable, but 5 is unforgivable imo. No business can afford to lose a vast swathe of its most important business to it's biggest competitor all at once like that , it's just an inexcusable. And if their main response is to make excuses and blame other people and external factors then that's the highway to failure.

The reality is that we'll see in the next couple of years if AGS were the issue. If the new owner leads to an uptick in routes/pax then that probably suggests AGS were holding the airport back.

As for attracting US flights in general, all of the things suggested are valid points, but the more fundamental issue is that we are in the middle of an inbound US tourism boom and Glasgow is consistently the 3rd most visited city in the UK by Americans, yet we have no direct flights to the US.

On top of that, going the other way we had iirc about 120k directs plus 55k indirects to Orlando pre covid, but now just have a handful of charters to MLB, no more than NCL.

And thousands more to the rest of the US. The recent interview with Stuart Patrick put a figure on that of 600 pax pdew. We also have one of scotland's most prominent travel agencies saying that - to put it crudely - they have more bums than seats and there is a lack of capacity at GLA to get pax to North America (and the same eastbound).

With those numbers it shouldn't be beyond the wit of those in charge to attract an airline to come to GLA to operate US services.

Being unable to attract even sufficient capacity to meet even existing demonstrable demand is again inexcusable and suggests something is going wrong.

[Clive]

As many have pointed out EDI is only 40 miles from Glasgow. That is absolutely nothing to North American travellers. We need to be honest and ask why wouldn’t airlines like WestJet use EDI to serve Scotland. Or more pertinently what could GLA bosses do to sway those business decisions our way?

You haven’t addressed that. I still think it’s easy for use to sit at home and claim GLA bosses are failures but we are not working in the hard nosed reality of multi million pound business decisions.

Of course we all want GLA to fulfill its full potential - that’s why we have this discussion group - but I always find it quite unfair to put a label of malaise or unprofessionalism on the GLA bosses when in fact they want and need every success far more than we do. To state that other route development teams are just better at their job is unfair IMO, without regard to the real world they have to work in.

As for the historical changes, you know well that in 1990 EDI was nowhere near capable of accepting the PIK transatlantic traffic or the boom that followed. BAA were quick to build the west pier at GLA to allow that while EDI remained a sleepy hollow for another decade. Indeed only in the last decade or so has it had the infrastructure that has enabled the rash of North American summer services it now has.

And it’s no longer the fact that they’ve taken GLA services but they’ve quadrupled the market to a level that even MAN eyes with envy. It’s because Scotland and Edinburgh in particular is chiming as a must see destination with tourists in ways it didn’t 30 years ago, as air travel and tourism has developed.

I’d be very pleasantly surprised if the new owners at GLA can land more than a daily New York hub and a leisure schedule to Orlando. Very surprised indeed. Cue Aer Lingus IMO.

[Speedbird Julie]

As many have pointed out EDI is only 40 miles from Glasgow. That is absolutely nothing to North American travellers. We need to be honest and ask why wouldn’t airlines like WestJet use EDI to serve Scotland. Or more pertinently what could GLA bosses do to sway those business decisions our way?

You haven’t addressed that. I still think it’s easy for use to sit at home and claim GLA bosses are failures but we are not working in the hard nosed reality of multi million pound business decisions.

Of course we all want GLA to fulfill its full potential - that’s why we have this discussion group - but I always find it quite unfair to put a label of malaise or unprofessionalism on the GLA bosses when in fact they want and need every success far more than we do. To state that other route development teams are just better at their job is unfair IMO, without regard to the real world they have to work in.

As for the historical changes, you know well that in 1990 EDI was nowhere near capable of accepting the PIK transatlantic traffic or the boom that followed. BAA were quick to build the west pier at GLA to allow that while EDI remained a sleepy hollow for another decade. Indeed only in the last decade or so has it had the infrastructure that has enabled the rash of North American summer services it now has.

Nail. Head. The establishment of the parliament changed everything. The international profile of Edinburgh was transformed amongst other changes.

Anything else, AGS, Dewar etc is almost irrelevant.

GLA didn't have the facilities in 1990 but the airlines indicated that they wanted to move there so they were built. Not ONE airline indicated a preference for EDI.

[Darren10]

Trully impressive if EDI is managing to support double daily 763s for 3 days a week to ATL. Would it no be worth their while sticking a 772/359 on the route, or is it a case of frequency and better connections through ATL over size? It really is a head scratcher that AGS couldnt get an NYC and MCO service direct from GLA. I really hope the new owners start to deliver.

DL no longer have the 772

You are absolutely right, my apologies! Even an a333/339.