as a regular visitor to the the area, who uses Prestwick, i agree that the Pure Dead Brilliant is not good. it shouts cheap and unprofessional. i travel from BHD with FR and love Prestwick as a gateway to Ayr and also to Glasgow city centre. the direct rail link is fantastic and the state of the station is of no concern as i wait in the terminal until the train is due. thousands of people travel to Scotland by the short sea ferry routes and FR need to increase the frequency of their BHD to PIK route again and capture more of this market.
i agree that holiday flights would be a great asset from PIK. the airport should offer free car parking, on a trial basis, to try to lure travellers to fly out of PIK. a PIK fan from Belfast.

Must be a short hop from Belfast!

last trip i timed it at 18 minutes in the air. :ok:

If they'd been making money at thrice daily it'd still be thrice daily. Market share is irrelevant if you can't balance the books. We all know the image is crap, the owner isn't brilliant, the main airline has them by the balls. Attracting spotters won't work as the only things worth seeing on the airfield can't be seen from the Terminal most of the time.

You say It's worth noting that all the renovation in the last decade has been done with minimal investment as a cursory glance at the decaying external structure will tell you. They are attempting to polish a turd, hence you are right, a proper renovation is needed. However Infratil do not have the capital to do this. Their plan was buy cheap and I suspect sell when someone else wanted to invest leaving the major capital investment to the buyer. Except no one significant wants to buy.

They can't offer free car parking as with little revenue derived from Ryanair directly, it's the ancillary revenue they rely on.

Think about it, they've built market and attracted a lot of passengers and managed not to make enough money to drive the business forward and to maintain revenue ( Atlas / Polar / Evergreen ). The business model may need some serious tweaking here.

I was once in the company of a certain gentleman and was going to bring up the "branding" in conversation. I was warned by my friends not to as everyone else does the same!
That was a while back, I wonder why it's still there as nobody likes it.

I would put £20 on that campaign being drawn up by 'someone' who wasn't Scottish, infact probably someone who had not long arrived in the country.


...........after watching too many episodes of Still Game?

Re: PIK-BHD.... Still FR's shortest sector anywhere: ~ 80 miles, and the crew still manage a full bar service. The block time is about double the flight time, so I've always had to sit through the "another on time arrival" fanfare... :hmm:

With the exception of a Cat 5 hurricane, FR block times always seem to allow for the ontime fanfare. After all, they are europes most reliable airline!

I am not such a big fan of Ryanair as I once was, although I still fly with them occasionally. Maybe it's just luck I don't know but I've found Ryanair to be the most punctual airline than any other but Easyjet is right behind them in terms of punctuality.

Has anyone notice that the Prestwick arrivals page on teletext has been down for most of the week? Apparently due to "technical issues" but why is it taking so long to fix I wonder?

Prestwick-Bournemouth Ryanair flights
 

Do you think Ryanair will ever restart the Prestwick-Bournemouth flights after they finish in mid July? Is this the start of Ryanair pulling out of Prestwick? If so what will happen to the airport????

FR will not leave the West of Scotland to EZY - the market is too big. The only reason they would leave PIK was if GLA came up with a better offer. Can't see that happening in the short term. You might though see the number of based aircraft go from 4 to 3 as aircraft are deployed elsewhere in Europe or simply laid up due to the recession.

When did it go from 5 to 4?

Sorry, meant 5 to 4.

I fear that 4 > 3 could be right enough 'allanmack'. May's provisional passenger numbers are down 26.8% to 163,492 according to the CAA, which is lower than recorded in May 2004. That percentage decline is around the biggest of all the larger airports in the UK.

As I type, the following aren't yet bookable for the winter in the Ryanair website (in addition to the soon-to-be-dropped BOH and KRK): BUD, HHN, BGY, PSA, REU (though this hasn't operated in some other previous winters), CIA, NYO and WRO. Each of these (except BUD, REU, BGY) is also operated from EDI and available for winter booking from there; PSA, although operated from EDI, isn't available for winter booking from there yet. Surely Ryanair aren't going to have such a drastic reduction in traffic through PIK - is this a bit of brinksmanhsip between FR and PIK with the aim of the latter reducing their fees further? (if indeed there's any scope for them to be reduced)

Though its nothing compared to the dreadful cuts Malaga and Faro have increases in july,gutted about loss of Hahn used it a few times

Fear not!
 

'Honest Man' - in addition to those frequency increases, I see that GRO goes to twice-daily on Thursdays from mid-July.

There's also an article in the local paper (here) this week about the local MP's concerns over the apparent cut in FR's winter schedule. It says:

"He [the MP] contacted the company following concerns that the airline is winding down its operation at Prestwick.

The winter timetable currently shows only half of the airline’s schedule.

But boss Michael Cawley says the full timetable contains much more"

So hopefully, many of the currently-unbookable destinations will soon become bookable for the winter. There's also a post on the BOH thread on this forum stating that BOH - PIK may return next summer (albeit just four-weekly). So there's perhaps some cause for optimism on the FR front at PIK, especially as in this article, FR claim that PIK is still one of the UK bases from which they are looking to expand (presumably once the recession is over).

The aforementioned article in the Ayr local paper also has a snippet about an aspiring 'Obanair' company conducting feasibility studies into linking PIK with Oban and Stornoway. If I recall correctly, Stornoway (and Derry?) were tried from a PIK a few years ago by the ill-fated Air Caledonian, but lasted only a few weeks. I seem to remember one of the pilots for that operation posting on here saying that the loads to SYY at least were reasonable, so best of luck to those behind Obanair.

Finally, can someone confirm to me that the recently announced Cargolux flight on a Monday from Toronto has started operation? (it was due to start in April I think and I'm just wondering if it did indeed start)

The Cargolux flight from Toronto (CLX777) did indeed start as planned but is not an extra service as the service originates in Huntsville and was already routing through Prestwick. It was reported at the time that if there was enough business it might become an additional flight. That has not happened so far and seems unlikely in the short term.

Looking at Ryanair, going forward into this winter, there are still no flights on the following routes :

Frankfurt-Hahn
Bournemouth ( announced as being axed )
Krakow
Stockholm-Skavsta
Reus ( summer only recently )
Grenoble ( not returning for the winter )
Marseilles ( summer only recently )
Budapest
Milan-Bergamo
Oslo-Torp
Rome-Ciampino
Pisa

Are we really TEN routes down on last winter????? How many based aircraft are planned?

According to Brian Donohoe, MP for Central Ayrshire, Ryanair have assured him that the full winter timetable has not been loaded yet and that they will not be cutting back on the number of winter routes from Prestwick. I also read in a newspaper that Ryanair plans to expand form Prestwick in the future.