Originally Posted by
Rusty Irish
He did a terrible job. The amount of routes and airlines lost especially under his leadership is staggering.
However I think GLA's problems are deeper than Derek Provan. AGS as an organisation and their billionaire owners don't care. The terminal is a dump, the connectivity to Glasgow CC is poor, not competitive enough to retain low cost airlines, long haul carriers.
I think you've summed it up pretty well there imo. Undoubtedly they face a difficult market with COVID and economic issues, but these apply in many other cases to EDI and other UK airports that seem to do better.
The public ownership of PIK is almost certainly unhelpful, but I think we shouldn't overstate it. Even now at peak summer PIK appears to have only 5-6 deps/day and in winter it can be 1 or 2/day......and these are FR flights that probably pay very little to use the facility, with pax that spend not very much in the terminal. Is that operation really significantly hurting GLA? - and how many airlines other than FR could credibly claim to be considering flying to PIK in order to get a better deal/push down charges at GLA? Surely very few, if any?
Nevertheless, I think GLA is now the only one out of the top 9 or 10 regionals in the UK that doesn't have an FR base and imo it's difficult to see how it can afford for that to be the case.
As an external observer it appeared to me that the airport did better when the previous MD/AGS CEO Amanda McMillan was in post. It seemed they had a more coordinated multi-agency approach to attracting routes and airlines. She departed quite suddenly a few years ago and since then it's been downhill.