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Flights Remain Scarce to Western Cities From Raleigh-Durham

Posted on: Friday, 8 July 2005, 21:00 CDT

Jul. 9--For business travelers in the Triangle, a trip west often is as much about killing time in airports as being airborne.

"It's pretty much the dreaded wait," says Joe Freddoso, the director of Research Triangle Park operations for Cisco Systems about three-hour airport layovers on some flights to his company's headquarters in San Jose, Calif.

"It's easily the No. 1 issue for us."

Persuading airlines to start nonstop flights to western destinations has become a renewed priority for Triangle executives, corporate recruiters and officials of Raleigh-Durham International Airport. Armed with new statistics showing that hundreds of thousands of passengers travel annually between RDU and Los Angeles, San Francisco and Denver, they've started a sweeping marketing effort to win new routes out West vital to recruiting new companies.

"It's a big deal," said Charles Hayes, president and chief executive of the Research Triangle Regional Partnership, an economic development group for the Triangle. "We're in competition for jobs and growth around the world and when companies ask if we have nonstop flights to the West Coast, we have to say no. We get that a lot."

Hayes' group faces an uphill battle persuading an industry in a financial tailspin that the time is ripe to begin new flights. With fuel costs at historic highs, ticket prices near all-time lows and few planes available for new service, expansion at RDU isn't a top concern for most carriers.

"All the cities westward have been studied by this airline several times in the last few years and the bottom line, despite the raw numbers, is, in each case, it hasn't come up as a profitable route," said Tim Smith of American Airlines.

RDU officials don't expect substantial new service west anytime soon, but they said the airlines now are at least receptive. Just a few years ago, they said, the last thing airline executives wanted to hear was a pitch for new service.

"From 2001 to 2004, it was swimming upstream," said Teresa Damiano, RDU's marketing director. "Now they're impressed with the community. They're saying it's on their radar screen."

Damiano said she has been talking with several carriers, whom she declined to identify.

RDU officials hope to persuade the carriers with a marketing study that shows 375,000 people traveled between the Triangle airport and Los Angeles last year. Between RDU and San Francisco, there were 255,000 travelers, and from RDU to Denver, 170,000.

The regional partnership plans to survey every company with at least 100 employees within 100 miles of RDU to determine their willingness to use new flights. Once the survey is done this summer, company executives will be put in contact with planners for the airlines.

"We're trying to show how demand has intensified and the community support behind that," Damiano said.

Persuading the carriers won't be easy, given the performance of previous western routes out of RDU.

Now-defunct Midway Airlines, which was based in Morrisville, twice offered nonstops from RDU to Los Angeles that were canceled later. Midway also ceased nonstops to San Jose and Steamboat Springs, Colo.

Southwest Airlines, the nation's top low-fare carrier, gave up on nonstops from RDU to Kansas City and San Antonio, Texas. And Midway and United Express both started and stopped nonstop flights from RDU to Denver.

"There wasn't enough demand for the flight," said United spokesman Jeff Green, referring to two daily nonstops from RDU to Denver that began in March 2004 only to be halted nine months later.

Past problems

Passengers may have been turned off because they didn't want to ride 50-seat regional jets on the 3-hour flight. But the flight also wasn't profitable because passengers had other ways to get to Denver from RDU. United offers six daily flights from RDU to Chicago O'Hare and eight daily round trips from RDU to Washington Dulles. From Dulles and O'Hare, United offers hourly service to Denver, Green said.

"Obviously there is demand for travel," Green said, but "if your intent is to connect to another plane, you can do it from Chicago or Dulles.

"If there are six flights to Chicago or eight to Dulles, who wins out over two flights (from RDU) to Denver?" he said.

United's flight from RDU to Denver illustrates how airlines are influenced not only by passenger numbers, but factors such as whether they can make more profit using a plane on another route.

"It's like a puzzle," said Southwest spokeswoman Brandy King. "We have to look at where the aircraft are most needed and where they make the most profit.

"There's more than just the bottom line, and it has to make sense with our overall route system and the highest demand within our route system is where we're going to place the aircraft," said King, adding that Southwest had no plans to begin nonstops from RDU to western destinations.

George Hamlin, an aviation consultant in Washington, D.C., said crowds of passengers may be traveling between RDU and western cities but that doesn't mean enough are willing to pay higher prices -- which could run several hundred dollars per ticket -- for nonstop convenience.

Hayes, the partnership chief, said he doesn't know whether travelers -- or their employers -- would pony up the difference, either. "We'll have to see how much more it would be," Hayes said. "Would they be willing to pay $50 more? Sure. But $1,000 more, probably not."

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AMR, LUV, UALAQ,

Source: The News & Observer

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