What's the strategic value to FR of keeping a weak and highly dependent PIK still alive with a handful of FR passenger services ?
GLA may well offer an amazingly good deal for the next 2 years, but would FR lose their negotiating position of strength such that in 2 years time FR end up paying near full price airport charges along with their maintenance base possibly ceasing to be viable ?
Of course this has to be weighed against the higher fares that can be charged or more passengers by virtue of operating at GLA rather than PIK
That’s a good point and I've often wondered how much weight they would attach to this issue.
Let’s assume that Ryanair move all their Prestwick operations to Glasgow and that Prestwick’s terminal closes as a result. The instant that happens, Ryanair’s future negotiating position is weakened as they’ll be serving both of the surviving passenger airports in the central Scotland market. They’ll therefore have no airports in that market to play off against each other and have no negotiating stance with either Edinburgh or Glasgow other than ‘we’re off if you don’t give us what we want’. Each airport would know that if Ryanair carried through with that threat, they’d be ceding the market to their competitors.
By contrast, their current negotiating position is as strong as it can ever be. They serve two airports in a three-airport market, meaning that they have the threat of moving their operations to the unserved airport to keep the other two on their toes. I wouldn’t pretend to know the details of their thinking on this matter, but I note that their public comments about Prestwick are often quite conciliatory which makes we wonder if they’ve realised that it’s in their strategic market-wide interest that a passenger terminal at Prestwick remains open.
Interesting few months ahead.