Bearsden wrote: ↑Wed May 04, 2022 6:54 pm
The comparison with Bristol is very interesting, my experience is that it is very popular with European tourists not just the city itself but with Bath, Wells, Gloucester, Cheltenham, Salisbury & Stonehenge etc nearby plus it's the gateway to Devon & Cornwall.
The numbers for foreign visitors are available from VisitBritain:
https://www.visitbritain.org/town-data
For 2019 (the last full year) the numbers are:
Glasgow 771k
Bristol 636k
Edinburgh 2206k
Leeds 338k
Newcastle 262k
Cardiff 382k (so around 15% of Edinburgh)
So Bristol has consistently fewer foreign visitors than Glasgow. I will grant you Bath. We should however remember that GLA is a gateway to the Highlands too, which are obviously very popular in themselves.
The question we might ask is of the chicken and egg variety - did the numbers of tourists in Bristol you've experienced always exist, and the airlines came in to serve that, or did the development of routes and capacity at BRS bring the tourists to Bristol and surrounds?
I mentioned GLA's noughties peak in 2006 earlier. If we look at Glasgow's foreign visitor numbers in 2006 and compare to 2019 there was only a 4% increase (30k). In comparison, foreign visitor numbers to Bristol increased by 233k/58%. Bristol plus Bath combined is up from 648k to 1037k, up 60%.
The above figures are interesting and would perhaps suggest that the the tourist numbers in Bristol have been driven by the growth of flights to BRS as much as the other way round.
I know we don't like to mention EDI here, but the same stats for EDI show nearly 1m visitors added, 64% growth. Last time I checked the castle, old town etc weren't built in the noughties. Most of the corporate headquarters located in Edinburgh were similarly already present 15-20years ago, so they don't particularly explain growth in the last 15 years.
We also see similar % increases in Manchester and Birmingham.
So we might ask why has the growth of foreign visitor numbers in Glasgow been apparently so sluggish compared to other UK cities, particularly Bristol and Edinburgh.....
Personally I find it difficult to believe it's a lack of promotion, marketing or profile, particularly when compared to Bristol and Birmingham.
I'd instead suggest difficult/expensive air access to GLA is playing a part.
The region is the headquarters of some very significant international companies eg Dyson, Renishaw, and of course BAe & Airbus around Filton, so relatively high disposable incomes (even after allowing for high house prices).
Whilst these factors in some case may have developed over the time period we're talking about, most of these factors were present before the noughties, so they again don't fully explain what we're seeing in the last 15 years imo.
If we look at economic indicators for Glasgow 2006-2019 then iirc there is decent improvement, so why such sluggish growth at the airport?
Bristol's runway is short (just over 2,000m) and its surface access is totally car & bus - local farmers run car parks in fields within 200m of the airport entrance!
Yes, this is what I was driving at earlier. No rail link (and afaik no real prospect of one) and road access that iirc is regularly congested and complained about by locals. We see GLA management repeatedly citing these type of factors as limiting GLA's growth and potential, but BRS has similar problems (plus the short runway!) and has managed to grow strongly despite it.
I agree that 'local airport' will have a weighting in the choice between GLA, EDI or PIK to the same destination but the point has been made that a return trip from Airport A might be less than one leg from Airport B - I asked a work colleague who lives in Paisley and returned from Gran Canaria yesterday if she had flown with a certain airline from/to Glasgow . . . No, Ryanair out of Edinburgh as it was much cheaper (just looked at fares for next Tuesday for a week £19.99 both ways)
Are FR really making money from £19.99 EDI-LPA? If yes then how?
Either way it would seem a priority to get FR expanding at GLA, but I don't get much impression GLA management think the same. That's fair enough if they can get growth elsewhere, but where is it to come from?
Clive wrote: ↑Wed May 04, 2022 9:04 pm
Good info. It’s not really a fair comparison. You’d need to use the 3 central Scotland airports combined (less all our London flights) to attempt to get a economic and demographic comparison. Folks like to make comparisons that suit only one side of their balance sheet rather than the real-world positions that airports actually operate in.
Your not appreciating the fundamental point of my argument. The reason that I'm talking about GLASGOW specifically is to demonstrate that the GLASGOW catchment should have driven growth in demand (both in and outbound) and that GLA, as the primary airport for that catchment should have been the main beneficiary of that. If that demand had instead flowed over EDI and PIK then that's not an explanation, but instead an illustration of the fundamental failure that imo is taking place at GLA because they are failing to compete effectively for pax that are travelling to and from the Glasgow catchment.
BRS is in a comparable competitive situation as I have already discussed in my previous post. The airport competes with a publicly owned (and allegedly subsidised) airport serving a UK national capital with a devolved parliament and for good measure. GLA management have clearly and repeatedly cited the former as seriously damaging to GLA's prospects and other forum members have done the same wrt to the latter factor.
But more importantly, it also competes with Europe's largest airport an easy cruise down the motorway in the opposite direction.
The CAA 2018 passenger survey (Table 4.2a)
https://www.caa.co.uk/data-and-analysis ... port-2018/ shows that
3.4million pax from the southwest flew from LHR. Then add on another
2.1musing LGW and 1m more using STN/LTN. So 6.5m pax from the southwest leaking to London rather than using BRS - If that's not stiff competition I don't know what is! And yet even with that MASSIVE leakage BRS still manages to outperform GLA hugely.
As such the suggestion that BRS does not face significant competition like GLA or implication that I'm missing out details on purpose is not justified.
We've been told not to compare with EDI, so I try to compare to other airports in the UK and Europe (which all to often are unflattering to GLA). Unsurprisingly the response, rather than discussing the issues and questions raised, is instead pretty consistently "oh well, you can't compare with airport X either cause....."
If we're suggesting that we can only compare GLA with airports that have virtually exactly the same economic, geographic and demographic factors as GLA then the reality is that that airport probably doesn't exist in Europe, nevermind the UK. As such we can't compare it with any other airports and any failings can't be examined.
The reality is that benchmarking, both against the market as a whole and individual competitors, is a standard part of measuring performance in most sectors and industries and I don't believe that there is any exception for airports. As such we absolutely should be comparing GLA with other airports in Scotland, the UK and Europe. That of course includes taking into account differences, but such differences most definitely do not automatically invalidate the comparison!
Yet for all its easyJet flights BRS would love to have some of the services GLA has with the likes of Emirates, Air Transat, Icelandair and Lufthansa. Worth noting that in the annuls of history BRS and NCL also lost their EWR services with United and have nothing across the Atlantic except TUI, like us.
LH serve BRS already. I believe it's going up to 13 weekly next summer.
