Glasgow Airport boss expects a return to growth
17.11.10
Glasgow Airport is expecting a growth in passenger numbers as it emerges from its worst 12-month period on record, the Herald reports its managing director has said. Despite losing nearly two million passengers over the last two years, Amanda McMillan said the airport had retained its position as Scotland’s leading hub for long-haul destinations and traditional bucket ’n’ spade charter holidays.
Ms McMillan told the newspaper that Glasgow Airport is well placed for recovery, with long-haul and charter flights both increasing in popularity. However, she warned there were still significant uncertainties ahead, including the prospect of further periods of extreme low temperatures. By last weekend, Glasgow Airport had used nearly a quarter of the amount of de-icer that it used over the whole of last winter. In doing so it managed to stay open for all but three hours last Sunday, with the majority of its flights operating as normal.
Ms McMillan warned that planned increases in air passenger duty could threaten growth. She said: ‘The future predicted tax rises on airlines are now bigger than the money the Government will receive through the banking levy. It’s pretty frustrating to be paying more than the banks that got us into this mess. The question the Government needs to answer is: do you want to grow or recover lost ground? We’ve been working very hard to recover the ground we lost, and the increases to the air passenger duty is a definite risk to that.’
Glasgow was overtaken by Edinburgh as Scotland’s most popular airport in 2007 due to a surge in scheduled flights from the capital to airports in the UK and Europe. It now sees about 6.6 million passengers a year through its doors, more than two million fewer than Edinburgh.
Despite suggestions by Edinburgh Airport’s managing director, Kevin Brown, that it plans to expand the number of direct long-haul flights, Ms McMillan said this was unlikely to affect Glasgow, which has enjoyed significant growth over the last year. Over the past year, Emirates, which flies from Glasgow to the far-east and Australia, has seen a 10% growth in passenger numbers; Pakistan International Airlines is up 4%; US Airways, which flies to Boston and Philadelphia, is up 8%. Virgin Atlantic, which flies direct from Glasgow to Orlando, has seen an even more impressive 37% growth in the past 12 months while British Airways, which has been hit by a cabin crew dispute, has seen a 5% drop.
Despite the failure to immediately replace the services of Flyglobespan, which carried about 600,000 people a year from Glasgow, Ms McMillan said airlines such as Jet2 and charter operations such as Thomas Cook and Thompson were now beginning to take up the slack. The expansion of services by Aer Arann and Aer Lingus has also added about 30,000 passengers a year.
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