I have also been advised that QR have been somewhat mischievous in Scotland with its publicising and has been wrongly advertising “Flights to Dubai, direct from Edinburgh” and “Flights to Hong Kong, direct from Edinburgh”.
British Airways also fly from Dubai direct from Edinburgh, in this day and age, a
direct ticket is well known to often involve a stop or aircraft change. it has never meant the same as non stop. Unless we know how many tickets have been gifted, there's no possible way of quantifying what impact it might have. Is it 1/10/1000/10,000/100,000?
Older ppruners may remember the "gold rush" that occured following the dropping of the traffic distribution rules which had required all transatlantic flights from Scotland to use Prestwick. Suddenly Glasgow was awash with transatlantic scheduled flights, several a day, but of course it didn't last. In respect of traffic going East, it will be interesting to see how things turn out.
Not that old! What changed here was the realisation that the market was skewed towards leisure, something BA surely knew from their own GLA-LHR-US figures, and that with the coming of the alliances, there was no need for each member to serve each airport with their own metal. American used to have an enormous European network served with B767-200ERs, all gone in favour of one stop over LHR with BA/AA.Code sharing with STAR partner BMI was what allowed Air Canada to drop GLA-YYZ to seasonal then drop it completely.
#progress I have never seen the point of Etihad full stop, like Qatar, it's a semi commercial arm of a far away gulf state. Their balance sheet runs on different rules from more traditional carriers.