Thanks to substantial federal aid, the nation’s airports were able to stay open through the worst of the pandemic and are now predicting improvements in the months to come. Managers at three Virginia airports are hopeful.
While the number of passengers using Roanoke-Blacksburg Regional Airport fell to 3% of what it had seen in 2019, travelers are coming back according to marketing Director Brad Boettcher.
"For the first couple of weeks of April which coincided with spring break in this region I was carrying over 70% of 2019 hisotrical traffic," he recalls, "and 2019 was the busiest year we had in the 2000s."
Business travel remained light, but many passengers had been vaccinated and were anxious to take a vacation, visit friends or family. Boettcher says some were lured by lower fares normally reserved for bigger airports.
"One of the silver linings is that the airlines never wanted to give us price parity with other airports in the region, because they knew they could take a premium with all the business traffic. About 60% of our traffic was classified as business. Now that's maybe 5% of our traffic. We don’t have that anymore, but I was able to show them – ‘Look, there’s a lot more leisure demand in this market that you are pricing out, forcing people to have to drive 3 or 4 hours to access a lower airfare,'" Boettcher explains.
And at Richmond International, spokesman Troy Bell says new routes were added.
"To Tampa, to Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Chicago-Midway, Denver service starting up in early May. These are areas that would be natural for leisure trips or if you’re visiting friends and relatives. They’re not normally what you would consider to be exclusively business destinations."
Melinda Crawford, who manages the Charlottesville-Albemarle Regional Airport, says those business travelers will be coming back.
"They can survive on Zoom, but they can’t thrive on Zoom because they can’t do the personal relationship that it takes to build business relationships."
And there’s more money in the pipeline from Washington through two additional stimulus programs. Crawford says air travel through Charlottesville will be strong as long at the University of Virginia, James Madison and Liberty Universities maintain normal calendars.
"There are new students coming in, looking at the school. The parents coming. The students leaving on spring break. The students going home for the Thanksgiving holiday. Students going home at the end of the semester, coming back. If you looked at our passenger traffic, you would see that we have peaks and valleys, and a lot of it is associated with the schools."
In Roanoke, Brad Boettcher says he will continue to pitch new routes from his airport based on travel data from other cities where lower fares had been offered.
"Historically what you would do is you would use travel data that will tell you where the person originated, if they made a connection, and what their final destination was, and then there’s another piece of data that you can pull that’s related to that. It tells you what the billing zip code was for the credit card that ticket was purchased on, so when you combine those pieces of data, you can see, ‘Okay, this person has a billing zip code in Roanoke, but they went out of Raleigh,' so I can assume that they drove down to Raleigh and then flew up to Boston. “
Using that information, he and other airport executives in Virginia hope to persuade the airlines to provide more direct service to other cities from Richmond, Roanoke and Charlottesville – resuming growth those airports were seeing before the pandemic.
