American Airlines

[bill]

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.



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.

Probably the best post on this forum. Very, very hard to argue against these well made and well thought out points.Well played Iain, take a bow sir!

[Clive]

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 If it had in 1990 when the PIK tx monopoly was rescinded then we wouldn’t be having this conversation.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.

You know what I mean. It was a 757 20 years ago. They have expanded the infrastructure over the years to now be able to handle multiple wide bodies at once. But as I say if they had any capability 34 years ago when Transatlantic airlines became free to use any Scottish airport they liked we wouldn’t be having this conversation especially as it turns out to be all the one market.

I know folk don’t like this comparison but North American airlines to serve the city of Barcelona will not give GRO a second thought. They’ll go straight to BCN.

[Clive]

That's a pretty bizarre comparison given that GRO is to BCN what PIK is to GLA.

I knew it wouldn’t be popular with those whose agenda it doesn’t fit but GRO to Barcelona city centre is 47 miles and the Omio coach takes 70 mins. Near enough identical to GLA-Edinburgh.

So what would entice a transatlantic airline to use GRO instead of BCN if it’s the Barcelona market they are wanting to enter? Nothing. There’s your answer.

[bill]

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%

Good post Bearsden. I can't believe that Belfast's two airports combined are 1 million pax ahead of GLA, or maybe I can. If anyone wants to add the GLA/PIK numbers feel free. I'd wager Belfast is still ahead. NCL will overtake us next

[Darren10]

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%

That's a catastrophic failure by AGS across their full UK operation. -60% at SOU ...

[Iain]

I'm sorry, but GRO v BCN is clearly not a valid comparison and I don't think you're going to have much success in persuading people that it is. Indeed, it's so wildly invalid I'm not going waste my time going into the reasons why that is because they're patently obvious.

I'm not sure I can think of any comparison elsewhere that really fits strongly, but let's look at a couple in the UK where airports are close to each other. Firstly let's look at BRS versus CWL. We've already discussed about this, but I'll just note it's very interesting how BRS - an airport with no rail link and notoriously poor and congested road acces - has absolutely smashed CWL, a publicly owned and funded airport, serving a UK capital city with a devolved parliament and a castle. Apparently competing with these things is exceptionally difficult for GLA but doesn't appear to be a problem for BRS - and the whole thing is put in stark relief by the numbers Bearsden has provided that show GLA losing 20% of it pax in the last 6 years, whilst BRS has gained 20%!

We could similarly look at the likes of LBA and LPL competing against MAN, with a much larger size differential between them and MAN than between GLA and EDI. This should make it far harder for them to compete with MAN than it is for GLA to compete with EDI, but again both these airports have outperformed GLA in the growth figures above and they have a number of Euro destinations GLA can only dream of - GDN, WAW, NCE, PSA, POZ, RIX, BTS, BGY, MAD, SOF, ARN, KTW etc.

Of course LBA and LPL don't have the same total pax numbers as GLA, but that's because of their geographical position in the British Isles which requires far less domestic air travel, particularly to London, resulting in vastly fewrer domestic passengers. If you look at international passengers numbers they are not that far away from GLA and on current trends it won't be long before they catch us up. Moreover we recently had the CEO of LBA saying that he expects to attract long haul traffic in the near future and will be disappointed if they don't have direct schedules to the likes Boston, Chicago and NYC in the next three years. And all this with the MAN behemoth - which has far more routes, airlines and pax than EDI ever will - just 40 or 50 miles down the road (a similar distance to that between EDI and GLA) AND high frequency to direct trains to MAN airport station from both cities.

The figures posted by Bearsden just add another layer to this story - not only is GLA performing poorly compared to it's peers (including many English cities with no castles, parliament or medieval old towns - and markedly fewer inbound tourists), but the 3 AGS airports stand out very clearly as underperforming collectively. This is pretty damning wrt AGS management and development of the airports imo.

To come back to the infrastructure thing - as far as I know a significant proportion of EDIs current US flights are still operated by narrow bodies. Looking at flightradar today there appear to be 9 US fights to Edinburgh and five of them are on narrow bodies. Even the widebody ones are on 767's so it's not like Edinburgh has to accommodate a whole bunch of 77Ws or A339s.

As I've already said in my earlier post, EDI have already had the facilities to handle at least a couple of widebodies since the mid 2010s when QR and EY were both operating daily flights there.

Anyway, the point that I and others have been making is that a real and abrupt change occurred in 2019 and onwards when GLA went from having multiple flights to the US with multiple carriers to now having none. Quite clearly the claim that this is due to infrastructure being developed doesn't stand up because that infrastructure didn't just magically and instantaneously appear in 2019!

Further to this I was looking at the visitbritain tourism stats I posted earlier. They show that US visitor numbers to Scotland, including Edinburgh and Glasgow, have increased fairly significantly and consistently over the period they cover from 2009 to 2022. In 2012 GLA had 77k US overnight visitors and iirc we had daily year round EWR service with UA, a seasonal US Airways service to PHL and 2 weekly seasonal VS 744 to MCO. Ten years later we had 136k US visitors and no direct scheduled US flight at all.

So, in the decade from 2012 to 2022, US visitor numbers to Glasgow increased by 77%, but scheduled service to the US decreased by 100%. Another damning statistic that puts the claim that GLAs lack of US routes is an inbound US visitor problem in a different light....

[Clive]

That's a pretty bizarre comparison given that GRO is to BCN what PIK is to GLA.

I knew it wouldn’t be popular with those whose agenda it doesn’t fit but GRO to Barcelona city centre is 47 miles and the Omio coach takes 70 mins. Near enough identical to GLA-Edinburgh.

So what would entice a transatlantic airline to use GRO instead of BCN if it’s the Barcelona market they are wanting to enter? Nothing. There’s your answer.

It's got nothing to do with agenda and everything to do with logic. GRO doesn't serve the largest city in Spain, it's merely a small airport close to a big city served predominantly by Ryanair.

Given it’s all the one market then EDI and GLA are both serving the biggest city in Scotland. You see our problem? We have no USP if it’s all one market and the long haul airlines know it. We should never have admitted it’s all one market - especially when we don’t even have a bus to the massive tourist destination along the road.

It's like asking why anyone flies to CDG when BVA is just up the road with a bus link...

So what’s the answer? A catastrophic failure by the owners of BVA or dirty tricks by the owner of CDG? Or could it be market forces?

[awwdabaaby]

This has gone way off tangent, time the thread got locked

[bill]

Whilst it has drifted there's some interesting facts and debates going on, so, carry on chaps.

[Clive]

Given it’s all the one market then EDI and GLA are both serving the biggest city in Scotland.

It's been this way for years - fact.

Yes. And EDI has been making strides for decades, serving the tourist city of Edinburgh and Scotland’s largest city, Glasgow, and all points on the compass. Unfortunately for the smaller airports this is what happens when it’s all the one market.

So what’s the answer? A catastrophic failure by the owners of BVA or dirty tricks by the owner of CDG? Or could it be market forces?

Are we really still doing this? As both myself and Iain have stated it's a nonsensical approach.

It was you who made that comparison. Do you have an answer or is it game, set and match?