Travel COU

When Kristi Ray boarded a 50-seat Delta plane at Columbia Regional Airport (COU), the well-connected executive vice president for the Columbia Chamber of Commerce expected to see at least some familiar faces. “When I looked around, I didn’t know anyone — and I know everyone in town,” she says, laughing. “You can’t pinpoint who’s traveling because it’s everybody.”

When she began asking Chamber members about the challenges their businesses face, air service continued to resurface as a concern. So when Mayor Bob McDavid reached out to the Chamber for recommendations for COU, Ray pounced on the opportunity.

“He asked us to look at the airport from start to finish: If this was our business, how would we make it better?” Ray says. With a business-minded approach, she moved forward in assessing consumers’ needs, finding airports that are doing it right and pulling together the best talent.

Michael Boyd, an aviation consultant with Boyd Group International, has been very pessimistic about airports in markets the size of Columbia. The aviation expert expects that the 100 smallest of the 450 commercial airports in the United States will no longer have commercial services by 2020. And Columbia is in the smallest 100.

“The air service in our market is fragile,” McDavid says. “Major airlines aren’t interested in investing in communities where they aren’t ensured a profit.”

In that same time frame as Boyd’s prediction, Columbia hopes COU will collect 40 percent of mid-Missouri’s market share of flyers — and the city thinks it’ll get there. “With fewer and fewer direct flights out of St. Louis, people are starting to question the two-hour drive, a flight, a layover and then another flight,” Ray says. “People are starting to value their own time more.”

“I think [Columbia’s citizens] understand that…we could easily be like Topeka, Kan., with no commercial service of any kind,” McDavid says. In fact, there were a couple months when Columbia had no commercial services in 2008 and prior to that only prop plane services to Kansas City and St. Louis.

“If we had American, Delta and Frontier, and Frontier said they’d take us to Denver, too, that would be the grand slam,” Ray says. “It’s a moving target, and we’re never going to have what everyone wants.” But she also realizes how easily COU could end up with no commercial air service.

“We’re planning for five years from now because if we don’t have these conversations now, it’ll be a problem then,” she says.

Tapping the university market
“We started hearing that [MU is] supposed to be getting more students from Chicago than from Kansas City in the next years,” Ray says. “And these students need to get to school, and their parents need to come visit.” According to Paul Toler, director of business services at MU, Chicago and Dallas are both important recruitment centers for students and student athletes.

For the 2012-2013 school year, MU received twice as many incoming freshmen from Illinois than from Kansas, and MU News Bureau Associate Director Christian Basi says a large portion of those numbers come from Chicago and Kansas City alone. MU also received 176 students from Texas, which, according to Toler, is a huge increase from years past.

Ray says it was apparent that routes to Chicago and Dallas were important to MU as well to the business community. “I think one of the biggest hurdles for us has been manufacturing, just knowing where they need to go,” Ray says. “Simco is one company we had no idea about. Their parent company is in Sweden, and they are a huge user of international travel.”

Public-private partnership
Regardless of recent losses, McDavid says there are plenty of lessons to learn from the experience and from successful airlines of a similar market size. “Bloomington, Ill., has a big commitment to its air service,” he says. At about the same size of Columbia and a similar distance from a major metropolitan area, Chicago, Ray says Bloomington is a positive model for COU.

“They had this aggressive manager who said they were going to make this work, and now they have 26 flights a day out of Bloomington,” Ray says. “And they still said they would kill to be us because our university is so much larger than theirs.”

Manhattan, Kan., another successful airport with a market similar to Columbia’s, used revenue guarantees to build up its service carriers, the success of which was a factor in the city’s choice to provide a revenue guarantee to American Airlines. “It’s basically saying, ‘We think you’re going to be successful in our town, and if you’re not, we’re going to help you a little bit,’” Ray says.

In Manhattan’s million-dollar contract with American Airlines, by the end of its term, only $175,000 of the $1 million was needed. So if American doesn’t break even, the revenue guarantee, funded by both private and public entities, will fill in the deficit.

With 85 volunteers from various industries, Ray and the Chamber were able to bring together top local sales experts to solicit private funds of $643,500 for the $3 million revenue guarantee.

They also sought expertise in the form of a terminal evaluation from the architecture firm of Trabue, Hansen & Hinshaw; Aimee Wehmeier of Services for Independent Living; and Jim DeJong, director of Accessibility and ADA education at MU. A local businessperson involved in former Missouri Sen. Kit Bond’s office who was familiar with federal grants got involved in funding possibilities for capital improvement.

“We went out to find a handful of experts in the PR field; we got Mary Wilkerson from Boone County National Bank, Matt Garrett from KOMU, Sabrina McDonnell from Landmark Bank, Chris Koukola from the University…people who do it on a daily basis,” Ray says. “It’s the perfect example of a public-private partnership.”

“American Airlines said they have never had such a partnership, where we’ve actively worked with them so much,” says Toler, who also volunteered his time to the Chamber’s recommendations. MU is also formulating a booking service through a travel website to negotiate better rates and incorporate the price calculations available on FlyMidMo.com to compare cost savings of flying from COU compared to driving to St. Louis or Kansas City to fly.

“They’ve all got the proverbial skin in the game, so they’re very willing to talk to employees and say they want them to fly out of Columbia,” Ray says.

According to Toler, when COU only had Delta’s flights and reached about 8 percent of Columbia’s market, 11 percent of university travelers were flying from COU. With the flights to destinations better suited for university needs, that number will likely increase.

Growing airport support
In 2012, Shelter Insurance booked about 12 percent of its tickets out of COU, and the company expects that number to increase with the new services being offered. “If the Columbia flights get us to where we want to go with no additional stops, and the price is fairly comparable, Columbia will be the likely choice,” says Joe Moseley, vice president of public affairs.

For Veterans United, which also supports the airport both through employees’ voluntary hours and its contribution to the revenue guarantee, Director of Communications Jon Galloway says the enhanced routes to Chicago and Dallas are helping its employees fly more efficiently.

One group that could benefit from a central booking agency or great use of COU is state government. “We’ve struggled to figure out exactly because travel is agency by agency, and there’s no one person saying, ‘Use COU,’ so we have to convince each department to do it,” Ray says. “We just need to get them in the mindset that [our airport] is only 15 minutes from the State Capitol.”

Despite room for continued improvement, Ray says, “We’ve never had an effort where it was so easy to get our business community to commit.”

“It made the most sense for me when a local banker told me why he supported the airport so much,” Ray says. On weekdays, it helped his employees get to where they needed to go; on weekends it helped his children go see their grandmother.

“I think the big challenge is keeping it in the backs of peoples’ minds,” McDavid says. “So at least they punch COU into Travelocity.”