Just pulled out a few quotes Mark Rodwell, Prestwicks' Managing Director, provided for my dissertation a few years back that in recent events, provides interesting reading.
“Where our capacity would be restricted would be through the terminal facilities. At present we transit 2.5million passengers a year. This can be increased to 5 millions by adding a few extra check-in counters and another baggage reclaim, but that’s the only real restrictions we have at the moment to increase from 2.5 to 5 million passengers.”
What do you feel is the biggest disadvantage that Prestwick holds?
“Disadvantage would probably be that Prestwick is not well known in the greater part of Glasgow, so achieving that reputation is important to us, there’s a lot of work going on to put that in place.”
“At present, where we’ve seen success is with low-cost point-to-point operations, and that’s where low cost operators get their efficiencies. As soon as you start to introduce transit passengers and transit baggage, that’s where you start to run into time issues, particularly the inability to turn an aircraft around in 20 minutes. So from a low-cost airline perspective the attraction for airports like Prestwick is to maintain point-to-point. However, it does open up the possibility for Trans-Atlantic operators to use Prestwick as a hub, and then distribute passengers out via the low-cost carriers, by fault becoming a hub airport without being a major hub such as Heathrow.”
"Infratil’s strategy at the moment is to buy airports that have future potential which is most definitely the case at Prestwick. As other airports become congested we will look at taking the associated with the over-spill. It’s the same with our other airports in Hamburg and Kent – these airports are purchased with the vision of long-term investments with future returns. Our investors are patient in waiting for these returns to come in. As you attract airlines, you start to build a snow-ball event. The bigger the through-put of passengers, the more airlines you attract.”