I don’t know the answer either, which is why I’m not paid large wads of cash to be an airport MD or a marketing manager. However, I do know that HL was on local radio on Tuesday once again stating that Peel were committed to the long term future of MME and were investing a total of around £56million over the next 10 to 15 years. (I don’t know where he plucked the figure from as I understood it was around £20million). The strategy he outlined was to put the facilities in place first in order to attract the airline operators, which in turn would then attract the additional passengers. Whether this will work of course is open to debate as things can change dramatically over 10 to 15 years. I’m sure we all remember the proposed major freight facility that eventually came to nothing, and like carbheathot, I too am getting thoroughly sick of the constant spin and lack of anything ever materialising in reality.
To be fair to GSM, they’ve done their fair share of advertising their flights and holidays in the local rags on a regular basis, but there’s only so many times that most people can, or want to, go to Palma, Alicante, Malaga, etc, and most airports are awash with the same destinations anyway. What we might need are some destinations that aren’t saturated with flights from every airport and operator in the country. Highly unlikely however, as MME’s 10 years behind everyone else because of a lack of investment and failure to introduce and then sustain some basic routes when the lo-co boom began.
I enquired about the possibility of a new service to Cork earlier this year following the departure of bmibaby. The response was cut and pasted straight from an airport press release along the lines of ‘we’re constantly talking to operators about introducing new routes, so keep looking at our website’. No acknowledgement that anything was going to be done with my request to gauge the need for alternative destinations. Perhaps that’s why we get nothing more than the usual bucket and spade flights and is one of the reasons for people complaining on here about cuts occurring from September onwards ?