Prestwick attempts to woo back low-cost airline
fox1
RICHARD ALLAN
PRESTWICK airport will try to convince Scotland's first low-cost airline to return to Ayrshire next year, after the carrier
switched to Glasgow for the winter season.
Tom Wilson, Prestwick's managing director, said the departure of flyglobespan.com might even help his airport because it left
attractive routes open to bigger airlines.
He said: "We are still talking to them ... our understanding is that they won't be operating any winter programme from Prestwick.
We will be trying to get them back for next summer. The carrier very much looks at summer and winter as two separate things."
The Herald revealed yesterday that flyglobespan.com had decided to move from Prestwick, its main west coast base since its launch
in March, to Glasgow because potential partner airlines in North America wanted their passengers to fly to Glasgow.
Mr Wilson said that other, bigger low-cost airlines would be interested in taking up some routes, like Prestwick-Malaga, that will
be given up by flyglobespan.com.
Tom Dalrymple, owner and managing director of parent company Globespan, is talking to airlines about starting low-cost scheduled
transatlantic services from Scotland. They would be the first transatlantic flights by any low-cost carrier, although some
industry sources said the services would have to be daily rather than two or three times a week to be regarded as a genuine
scheduled service.
BAA Scottish Airports, Glasgow airport's owner, revealed Glasgow had achieved eight million passengers in a 12-month period for
the first time. Passenger numbers in June rose 3.1% to 809,300 to bring its total for the past year to just over eight million.
Glasgow, Edinburgh, and Aberdeen handled 17.8m passengers in the year to June, up 8.1% on the previous year.
-July 11th