Joplin Airport Wants Consultant to Save Passenger Travel

From today’s Joplin Globe:

A renewed effort will be made this year to bring to Joplin an airline service that could rescue the airport’s plummeting passenger count.
The Joplin City Council will be asked at its regular meeting tonight to approve a new agreement with an airport consultant to lobby for the Joplin Regional Airport and help it negotiate its next Essential Air Service agreement.

The U.S. Department of Transportation’s agreement with Great Lakes Aviation to provide passenger plane service at the Joplin airport will expire in October. The procedure of attracting potential bidders will begin because the DOT will issue bid packets in June or July, according to city documents.

Airport manager Steve Stockam said the passenger count has dropped from 35,000 a year when the airport was served by the former Mesa Air Group to 10,000 last year. Mesa liquidated, and the Essential Air Service designation was awarded to Great Lakes in 2008. EAS is a government program to ensure air service to communities that had it when airlines were deregulated.

Stockam said an air service study received last month showed that the reason for the declining use is that people looking for a flight into Joplin don’t know the Great Lakes name or cannot find where to book a flight because Great Lakes is not affiliated with a major carrier.  “It really is not the community’s fault that the air service is what it is,” Stockam said. “We definitely need to support it, but currently the market is being underserved because we need a branded service.”

People wanting flights “recognize American Airlines, United or Delta, but they don’t recognize Great Lakes. Our numbers prove it,” he said of the passenger count.  Joplin does not suffer from the price of airfares or because there isn’t enough business here, as critics contend, Stockam said.

“Both of those are pretty much misnomers from the standpoint that yes, fares are high for certain locations and for the time in which you go,” he said. “But we have a huge market area. ... Two-thirds of our traffic comes in from outside to do business. For every ticket generated locally to fly out, there are two tickets sold to fly in (to Joplin).”  But travelers, mostly for business, find it difficult to book a flight in from the East or West coasts because Joplin does not have a name-brand airline, Stockam said.

He does acknowledge that Great Lakes is a stable airline that is not in financial difficulty, but it operates through Denver.  Joplin needs a carrier that connects to Dallas, Chicago or Memphis, Stockam said, in order to have full service nationally or internationally.  That’s where the new agreement comes in.

Stockam said the performance-based contract awaiting council action would give the consultant an added incentive if it can hook Joplin up with more business.  It would pay the consultant $1 for every extra passenger above the current number, on top of the set hourly fees paid for consulting work done on behalf of Joplin with the airlines and the DOT.  If no increase results, the airport will not owe the extra pay, Stockam said.

Representatives of six consulting firms were interviewed by Stockam. He proposes contracting with Sixel Consulting Group, which is based in Oregon but has consultants in several large U.S. cities, because it proposed to do the work for a lesser fee with the potential of earning the bonus. The airport’s consultant has been the Boyd Group, which did the air service study.