EDINBURGH

[smith]

It's high time somebody took them to court under trades descriptions act for using the term "British" in their name. Their attitude to Scotland in particular has been all too clear for years.

It's even worse in Wales boyo, BA don't fly anywhere from Wales!!!!

[Keyvon]

Charter carrier Viking Airlines will also offer flights from Edinburgh, this summer (during the peak Scottish holiday season), on behalf of Kiss Flights and other tour operators.

Confirmed routes are :

Corfù 21/06-02/08 on Mondays
Heraklion 22/06-03/08 on Tuesdays
Rhodes 23/06-28/07 on Wednesdays
Verona 4th July and 17th October only

Besides, Viking Airlines features 12 holiday routes from Glasgow and also flies from Aberdeen for Newmarket Air Holidays, on selected dates, to Funchal, Pula, Porto, Innsbruck, Verona, as well as Naples.

Seems like this airline is expanding swiftly in Scotland.

[Skipness One Echo]

How come is it that scotland cant sustain airline or have a national flag carrier of its own we have seen so many scottish airlines come go out over the years.

The Scottish market is mainly outbound and very historically very seasonal and so outwith the summer peaks, a lot of routes are desperately under-used. I think GSM did a fine job in showing the market is there and that the legacy operators were underserving things, but then spoiled it all but expanding madly, ruining their good name and going bust.

BA don't fly anywhere from Wales!!!!

True but they still see way more (empty) BA heavies at Cardiff than in Scotland!

[airhumberside]

Keyvon - EDI-Verona is for Newmarket and not Kiss Flights

[bmi goldenboy]

Speaking as a pretty frequent traveller I would absolutely prefer to shorten my business travel hours by flying direct from EDI and GLA. There is a demand, that's why CO, EK and PK manage decent year round long haul loads, even in J, even in a recession. Now that CO is in Star I'll use them at least 3 times this year rather than going via FRA or LHR and I know many others that are doing the same and that's before the new J seats are installed in CO's 757's. Once they are in then I predict even more will happily move over to these direct TATL options.

[Skipness One Echo]

PK manage decent year round long haul loads, even in J, even in a recession

Has just escaped the axe for never making a profit, see the BBC Scotland news site.

Once they are in then I predict even more will happily move over to these direct TATL options.

It's not a massive difference doing Scotland-US Hub-Us Final Destination as opposed to Scotland-UK / European Hub-Final US Destination which is why Continental have been succesful but have not attracted a massive amount of competition. Delta tried and failed twice at EDI and BA AA AC UA have all tried and failed at GLA.

Part of the reason CO can make the likes of BRS and BFS to the US pay is that Continental's high legacy Labour Agreements were destroyed when Eastern's Frank Lorenzo took control. After this, a new CO was rebuilt from the ground up with lower costs into the airline it is now. Delta never went through this quite so badly, United is in it now and American has never even gone Chapter 11 and has high costs to this day. Hence why NCL -JFK was a comedy idea from day 1.

The best news for EDI was that the twice daily EWR-Scotland service which used to be split GLA/EDI is now wholly EDI.

[Donkey497]

It's not a massive difference doing Scotland-US Hub-Us Final Destination as opposed to Scotland-UK / European Hub-Final US Destination

There is one MAJOR difference, in that it grates like fingernails on a blackboard to be sitting in an aircraft at 30,000+ feet, being told that if you look down you can see Central Scotland and thinking that on a journey of several thousand miles, you have already spent over six hours travelling time to get within a handful of miles from your home.

It cannot make sense, commercially, environmentally or socially to spend 90 minutes flying in the opposite direction from your destination, only to hang about on the ground for an hour or more to fly back over your point of origin then repeat this process in reverse when headed in the opposite direction.

To pick up on another earlier point as well, I will wherever possible avoid using Heathrow, Gatwick & BA in particular due to the frequency that they have delayed or cancelled my connecting flight due to weather problems or technical issues down south and the subsequent lack of service, and occasional abuse rendered by their UK staff.

On the other side of the coin, in my experience, any BA employee who is based outside the UK has been an absolute model of best practice customer service and attention to details.

It would be great if BA realised that if they are going to rely on a hub & spoke model based on Heathrow, they they have as much of a responsibility and need to get people into the heathrow hub on the provincial & short-haul feeder services as they have to putting out the long haul heavies. There's no profit in sending out a heavy only 2/3rds full, but that's what they seem happy to do at times.

[goldeneye]

Delta tried and failed twice at EDI and BA AA AC UA have all tried and failed at GLA.

I think to say that Air Canada failed at Glasgow is unfair. AC operated flights from GLA for more than 60 years, granted they are no longer operating to the UK regions in favour of connections on BD over LHR. AC pulled off the GLA-YYZ in 2005, at the time there was competition from TS, TCX, OOM.

I really would not be suprised if AC revived there YYZ to GLA and MAN in the not to distant future.

[alm1]

VNO-EDI

Star1 Airlines (www.star1.aero) will start twice-weekly Vilnius-Edinburgh on 28 March.

[theredbarron]

Edinburgh isnt mainly outbound

S1Echo. You say "The Scottish market is mainly outbound". Overall, marginally so but in an Edinburgh context quite untrue which is why Edinburgh has continued to grow while Glasgow and Prestwick have shrunk over the recession period.

I'm taking numbers off the top of my head here (can't be bothered to go and check) but from memory Glasgow's outbound bucket and spade traffic accounted for about 40% of the airport's total throughput at its peak, whereas at Edinburgh the outbound BandS brigade contributed 3% or so. The rest of Edinburgh's business was much more balanced, as witness the number of lo-co flights not to the sunspots but to major European cities, i.e. primarily bringing inbound tourism to Scotland, and because of the weak £ against the € that business has been sustained.

[Skipness One Echo]

"can't be bothered" is no way to present an argument. Make the effort and post a link please? EDI was traditionally more of an inbound tourist destination than GLA but as a nation, Scotland is not the tourist magnet it imagines. Perhaps your fab, new Republic will change all that..... The fact remains that the Scottish market has a short high season and dies in winter in a way that warmer and less dark climes don't.

[Say again s l o w l y]

I'm not so sure of that. After London, Edinburgh is the biggest tourism destination in the UK.

[theredbarron]

s1echo The facts are well known; look them up yourself. Edinburgh is very definately a year round inbound tourist market, and as Say It Slowly says, the second biggest tourist destination in the UK. Stay South of Watford young man; you may know what goes on down there; you clearly have no idea about what's happening up here, either in the aviation business or in tourism..

[Skipness One Echo]

s1echo The facts are well known; look them up yourself. Edinburgh is very definately a year round inbound tourist market

I was born in Ayrshire, lived in Glasgow then left after University for London and a better paid job with less sectarianism and "I kent yer faither-isms". I think I know Scotland well enough thank you, and I do get back a few times a year and enjoy it though.

So less time patronising me, and more time linking to the data you say is "well known". I know EDI has a much stronger inbound tourist market than the West Coast, a walk down Princess St will tell you that. However I still maintain that you are being very over optimistic in your assesment. The fact that there is no Scottish based airline of stature tells you that. As to Globespan, they built a market then blew it !

You claim that outbound Scot's on their way to the beach constitute

the outbound BandS brigade contributed 3% or so

which sounds wrong to me. I am asking you to back it up as it looks wrong. If the facts are so well known, share the data with me so I can see that a mere 3/100 ex EDI are in this category.

Finally when you say

Stay South of Watford young man

assuming I was non Scots, you show the narrow parochialism that grinds aspiration down, north of Berwick even to this day. This is pprune sir. I sure as *cough* don't need your permission to comment on my old stomping ground.

[allanmack]

Skipness, your posts are usually pretty balanced and informative however you do yourself no favours with comments like..."Perhaps your fab, new Republic will change all that.." Uncalled for. In terms of the three airports, as SLF I use all three on a fairly regular basis for business and my obervations (no data to hand) are that:

Edinburgh: Business , In-bound Tourists and then Holidaying Scots in that order.

Glasgow: Business, Holidaying Scots and in-bound tourists.

Prestwick: Holidaying Scots equal to in bound tourists and then business way behind.

I would be really interested in the % breakdowns for each airport.

[theredbarron]

AllanMack. I suspect that you didn't mean to miss them out because we've been talking tourists, but I believe that business travellers are the single biggest component of Edinburgh's business. These again have held up better in the recession, helping Edinburgh to maintain its overall traffic numbers and its lead over Glasgow.

S1Echo. I've now had the time to go and get actual numbers. Taking July this year as a representative month - it is usually the busiest "bucket and spade" one of the year - Edinburgh's charter traffic accounted for 3.96% of the airport's terminal passenger throughput whereas Glasgow was 39.2%. Charter versus scheduled is the only measurement which is available and so doesn't fully back up my point, but its not going to be so far out that it makes any real difference when used to illustrate the substantial difference in the business model of both airports. .

PS The CAA's provisional totals for 2009 show Edinburgh at 7th place in passenger numbers, just a whisker behind Luton and Birmingham, and now about 25% ahead of Glasgow.

[nivsy]

Ach said it before - will say it again - close down both EDI and GLA - build a central Scotland airport with good road and rail infrastructure - lets check some of the benefits: Airlines will benefit with a more concentrated service, public know where they have to go to get direct flights, job creation, claw back some of the money the UK country pour in to Europe by getting European grant - they are a sucker for that sort of thing, BA may even fly North on European or further afield trips (thats probably the most unlikely in all this debate, bring in Boris Johnston - he wants to build an airport on the water somewhere like the Thames no(?), annoy lots of local conservationalists (that would be funny), and hey presto - Scotland gets the airport it so richy deserves - Pure Dead Brilliant Scotland International - see it even has a name.

Blimey I am in the wrong business.......

[PIK3141]

Nivsy.
We once had that for long haul, served by BOAC/BA, Air Canada, Pan-Am then Northwest, Wardair, CP Air, Laker, BCAL, TIA, etc, etc, sometimes all in the same day, sometimes 14 Air Canada DC8's in one day. Then some idiots screwed it all up, and look what we have now !

[ConstantFlyer]

A new-built central Scotland airport makes sense. Most airports in Britain are actually in the wrong place: they developed around where runways were historically, rather than where they would most usefully be today. (Never mind the new tramlines on Princes Street in Edinburgh - turn it into a stolport instead!)

I strongly believe that airports need to be hubs for all forms of public transport - rail, bus, tram, coach - serving easily, regularly and speedily all the surrounding communities, business destinations and tourism hotspots. There are not many that have achieved it, though perhaps Schiphol has come close (and is also the only airport I know of that used to be a seaport!).

A new purpose-built airport serving Glasgow, Edinburgh and everywhere in between and around through fast rail and road links could also serve as a hub for flights to North America and the rest of the UK, or even Europe. Build Heathrow's third runway out of a bit of the M8 motorway, then, perhaps, base a British flag-carrier there!

[IJM]

Nivsy - I can see one fatal flaw with your plan:

Was "Pure Dead Brilliant" not claimed by Prestwick a while back?!