So just to clarify the above link below:-
Mr Bath, former boss of Bath Travel, whose father Peter’s firm Palmair operated from Bournemouth Airport for half a century, said Manchester Airports Group's (MAG) tenure since taking over the airport in 2001 had been “a disastrous spiral”.
He said the firm had relied too much on Ryanair to provide flights, spent too much money on a new terminal in the mistaken belief that it would entice more passengers, and started charging £2.50 for cars dropping off passengers - “without a shadow of a doubt the most disastrous PR decision of any airport in Britain”.
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My father said people fly from Bournemouth Airport because the parking is cheap and they can get home in 20 minutes,” he said.
“They lost Palmair and got a new terminal that didn’t make an iota of difference to passenger numbers, which people have to pay £2.50 to see, which is a lot of clunking in the machine and people hate it.
“If they hadn’t built the terminal they wouldn’t have had to charge extra. It was a disastrous spiral.”
In 2009 MAG spent almost £50 million on the new terminal, as well as an improved runway, radar, navigation and
road access(really?). Passenger numbers peaked at just over a million in 2007 and stood at 667,981 last year.
Mr Bath said he felt “bitter” about the end of his father’s firm, just weeks after the new terminal was finished. He said MAG had handed Palmair’s flight data to Ryanair to demonstrate the viability of the airport, causing the aviation giant to put identical routes in place.
“In the winter that year, when Palmair normally operated four or five flights, Ryanair decided they weren’t going to do anything,” he said. “Bournemouth went down to two flights a week. It was a disaster, the place was a ghost town.”