extremeley reasonable allanmack!

i booked last night, 12c return + taxes!

Anybody know what airlines are operating the FUA flights to Tenerife and Gran Canaria tonight on behalf of Seguro?

Think Seguro will keep on FUA for next year? Im supposed to fly to PMI next year on a Fri flight at 12:45 with seguro don't know what airline yet though.

AEA and IWD are operating the PIK flights !

Think Seguro will maybe start to use UK airlines such as Monarch, Bmi or Jet2 or think they will just keep LTE and replace futura with Iberworld?

A great airport in time gone past but reading the posts on this thread reminds me why I left the area 22 years ago for pastures new.

I truly hope the area keeps one of the best fog free airports in the UK somewhere near productive, how much I hate to read how things have been allowed to deteriorate is beyond description.

A resource that may do better if the BAA abandon Glasgow as is predicted.

:E

Jox views are rather negative! At this time all airports (and airlines) have problems but to be positive Prestwick is one of the few airports still showing passenger growth in recent months - not much but better than the -ve figures coming out of Glasgow.

The terminal suffers from growth which has overloaded the existing building designed for no more than 2m pax - currently 2.5m.

Air freight is suffering badly from the loss of Atlas/Polar but Prestwick remains the only airport north of Manchester which can handle 747 freighters.

Seguro Holidays has went bust!

Scots May Be Stranded After Seguro Holiday Firm Collapse (from The Herald )

from official Seguro site...
 

Seguro Travel Limited and its subsidiary Seguro Aviation Limited which trade under the style Seguro Holidays and Kent Escapes ceased trading on 10 September 2008.

Customers who have booked to travel by air from 10 September onwards should refer to the Civil Aviation Authority website (Air Travel Organisers' Licensing | ATOL) where further advice is given.

The directors of the company deeply regret the closure of the business which has been brought about by the failure of Futura Airlines last weekend.
The directors of Seguro have no involvement in the management of Futura Airlines.
The directors apologise to all of our customers.

Any news on any charter companys coming in to replace Seguro?

Ryanair could consider Transatlantic flights from Prestwick aswell as Stansted and Birmingham should they aquire Aer Lingus and use the long haul a/c they have on order!
Ryanair 'To Begin Transatlantic Flights'

How f***ing deperate would you need to be? I mean come on!!! Long haul cattle class is not brilliant but imagine what Ryanair would offer. 8 hours in a dayglo plane being sold scratchcards by Helga from Warsaw! Would make the midnight Ibiza run seem like Raffles Class by comparison!

Sorry, but Sophie from Riga (who was gorgeous) would be preferable than the last lot I had with CO into Newark! She would make the 8 hours or so (despite the dayglo) very bearable!

Flew Ryanair 12 times last year and I found that barely 1/3 of them can grunt in English! Awful people. You get what you pay for lads! Consider why the Prestwick base doesn't have a lot of Ayrshire lassies wanting to be hosties. Awful conditions (!)
I know that a lot of the Stansted based crew top up their earnings by other methods on a Friday night in Bishops Stortford.......:eek:

It won't actually be Ryanair that is flying any transatlantic routes but a sister airline set up by Ryanair. I watched an interview with MOL a few months ago. He said that on the transatlantic airline there would be business class as well as economy. He said that in business class there would be "beds and XXXX XXXX" Ryanair seems pretty sure that they will be allowed to take over Aer Lingus who may operate these transatlantic flights.

Believe me Ryanair will NOT be allowed to get their hands on Aer Lingus. M O'L has pissed off way too many politicians both in the Republic and in Europe for that to happen. I actually suspecy this is a diversion so that people take their eyes off the very real problems facing the voracious Ryanair ! The main profit driver remains Stansted and that is taking a hammering at the moment.

Can this dump get any worse?

I fly in and out of PIK about twice a month and the appearance, standard and cleanliness of the terminal has become truly shocking.
On arrival you are confronted with an entrance area that has a boarded up window and a new set of narrow, unpainted swing doors that are nearly impossible to get through if you are towing luggage. Despite this area having No Smoking signs it is normally full of gaspers puffing away, and the floor littered with dog ends.

Once you have checked in the next disappointment is the catering area. Where they get the staff to man these places is beyond me. The incompetence in order taking, lack of any semblence of customer service and ability to keep the place clean has to be experienced to be believed. You have to be either starving or have very, very low standards to want to eat there. Peckhams should, on the face of it, be a good place to visit but at Prestwick they have refined the definition of hopeless.

Getting through security has never been a problem but the insistence on forcing you to pass through the duty free area to get to the departure hall (lounge would be to grand a word) is wrong. I cannot stand the stench of the overpowering fragrances that they spray around and I am usually gagging by the time I escape through the other side. It used to be possible to bypass this area a few years ago but that exit seems to have now been restricted to crew.

The departure hall is where the true horror story begins. I am convinced the seating area is a test bed for finding out how long seat fabric can last without replacing, and the adhesive qualities of chewing gum.
The two catering outlets were merged into one recently and it serves anything that can be processed by immersing it in fat. There are the usual plastic wrapped curly sandwiches if you want to avoid a coronary. Judging by the size of the guy serving the stuff it appears that none of the left over food goes to waste. He has aslo been programmed to speak in grunts and avoid any eye contact. The coffee is distilled from recycled tarmac and despite the offer of free top ups, I have never seen anyone risk a second bucket.
One end of the food area used to have a glass wall giving natural light, but this has been covered over in plywood and painted a lurid colour by a blind man with a 2" brush.

The gents toilets in this area are amongst the most vile I have come across. A tip for the management.......... employ a cleaner. If you already have one, sack him or her. Also, sack the person who is supposed to supervise this area, they are not doing their job. Calling a toilet a Bog has never been truer than in this place.

I know it has been gone over before but the corporate logo and graffitti style paint job are a disaster and an embarrasment. Many people are nervous about flying and I would like to have been a fly on the wall when the creative geniuses who made up the logo with the word "dead" in it made their presentation to the airport management. What on earth were they thinking of? You get the impression that someone crept into the airport in the middle night and covered the place in this horrible mess.......and the place was so bad in the first place that they actually felt it was an improvement!

Rant over :*

Why not try flying somewhere else ?? Vote with your feet :ok:

Sitigeltfel, I have to agree with you on most of the points you raised. The toilets could be a lot cleaner although they don't seem to be quite as bad as they used to. The seating in the departure lounge is a total disgrace and the catering leaves a lot to be desired. I have to disagree with you regarding Peckhams. I have always found the staff there to be very pleasant and helpful. The food and drink is of very good quality and not over priced by any means.
Isn't it high time though, that they got rid of the awful purple decor and that "pure dead" embarrassing and out of date slogan? I see from your profile that you come from Normandy. I presume that you use Prestwick to fly into Beauvais. I haven't flown in there for a few years. What is it like now, in comparison with Prestwick? Is it any better than when I last flew there seven years ago?

And a very merry xmas to you too!

Seriously despite some over-exaggerations you are in the main right. Thankfully £1.6 million is to be spent on the terminal in terms of upgrading and expansion, mainly around the departure lounge. There was money also put aside last year to do up the train station but nothing has happened in over a year and it badly needs attention. As regards the staff, then there are some very good ones although there are the usual numpties but I'm afraid PIK isn't alone here and that at every airport I have passed through over the last year there is generally a lack of decent customer service. I would agree with james17069 that the staff in Peckham's are pretty good in terms of attention and friendliness.

I've used PIK a handful of times this year for the short (and dirt cheap :ok:) hop to BHD (even including the cost of the half price railfare to the airport doesn't come close to the price of any service from EDI, DND or GLA) . I hadn't used it for many years but can't say I'm that impressed with the airport at all I don't have many complaints about the Landside area, but airside is awful. If I wasn't so cautions with time managing I'd leave the absolute bare minimum before going through security when I use the airport.

While flying to BHD on Saturday (27/12) we were told of a slight delay of around 20 minutes. This was probably not the fault of PIK staff (no reason was given), but when it came to calling our flight they did so and got as many of us past the doors at the end of the lounge and then left us all clogging up the corridor to the gates. The DUB flight (which was due to leave after us but ended up going first) then had to shuffle past us all as we all squezed into the side. We then waited around for a few more minutes after the DUB passengers had all left before we all got told to come forward. :ugh:

Arriving back today was pretty miserable. A long, freezing cold walk down some dirty, grey corridors (no Welcome to Scotland posters, as found in most other airports in Scotland, for a start) to the sort of welcoming arrivals area, which for some domestic passengers means an extra walk down a flight of stairs to a hard to find baggage reclaim area!

The access to the outdoor area of the departure lounge had been blocked off this time by plywood as was mentioned earlier in the thread. This is for, I assume, a much overdue revamp of the area. Hopefully they'll create an organised, decent sized and just in general adequate queing area and provide more comfortable seating.

Just a thought but where do you expect the owners of Prestwick with it's principal operator FR (and almost only operator) to get the cash to pay for some of these nicety's? Certainly not from FR, look at the departure boards and count the number of departures by main carriers like BA, LH, BD etc... Don't spend too long looking tho. Do you get my point? Maybe Infratil should drain some cash from another of it's money making airports like MSE??? Ha ha maybe not.
It's a low cost airport. I use it a lot and can't say I'd complain other than the fact there is no natural light in the departure lounge as there are no windows. Other than that I've seen a lot worse. Have you ever flown through the old TSF terminal Ryanair used to use? Now that was tragic but we're paying peanuts (well most of us).