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Today’s banner
Within a few hundred yards of Commonwealth House, Glasgow
Photograph by
Islay McLeod
I have thought
of a way of making
Ryanair popular
Quintin Jardine
Recently, the following appeared on the Ryanair website, and was reported in other media:
Ryanair, the world’s favourite airline, today (12 April) announced further cuts at its Edinburgh base with the closure of eight routes and 60 weekly flights from October 2012 as BAA Edinburgh refuses to offer a competitive cost base for more Ryanair growth.
Ryanair’s Edinburgh traffic will now fall by 500,000 pax per annum (from 1.8m to 1.3m) passengers), leading to the loss of up to 500 ‘on-site’ jobs according to ACI figures.
Today’s route cuts (to Bratislava, Bremen, Frankfurt, Fuerteventura, Gothenburg, Kaunas, Lodz and Poznan) follow the closure of five routes from Ryanair’s Edinburgh summer schedule and Ryanair warned that deeper cuts to its winter schedule may be inevitable if BAA Edinburgh fails to agree an extension to its five-year base agreement (which expires in Oct 2012) on more competitive terms. The BAA’s failure to secure a long-term growth deal, with Europe’s largest airline, is further proof that the BAA has no interest in securing the future of Scottish tourism, traffic and jobs as it artificially increases charges in the hope of making a killing on the sale of the airport for its Spanish shareholders.
Ryanair regrets these cuts and confirms that they can be reversed if a competitive and realistic cost offer becomes available from BAA Edinburgh.
This was the latest gambit in Ryanair’s ongoing bid to screw the maximum commercial advantage from the forced sale of Edinburgh, and I hope that it will be resisted by the new owners. The company is demanding, as it does all over Europe, preferential treatment over its competitors, and it has no shame in so doing.
Edinburgh Airport was there, and profitable, before Ryanair came along, and it will continue to thrive even if it pulls out entirely. In fact, I wish
that it would do just that, and look seriously at an alternative.
Quintin Jardine is a Scottish crime novelist, a ‘crusty but urbane Scot,
in his prime, and done with disclosing his age’.
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