Airport charged with courting more nonstops

Leadership changes at the San Antonio Airport System come as city officials grapple with the loss of some 300,000 passengers to Austin-Bergstrom International Airport because of lower domestic ticket prices and the lack of nonstops to key cities such as Boston.

There’s also a nudge from Mayor Ivy Taylor to think long term as growth patterns suggest San Antonio and Austin will continue to melt into one large metro. Taylor said investigating the possibility of a regional airport is long past due.

City Manager Sheryl Sculley on Tuesday temporarily assigned Assistant City Manager Carlos Contreras as primary lead of the city’s aviation team, with Frank Miller, city aviation director since 2009, reporting to Contreras.

“Carlos will immediately address a variety of projects including: expanded Air Service (particularly increasing the number of nonstop flights), customer service, and oversight of major capital projects for the two airports,” Sculley wrote in an executive team memo.

The memo came just days after Miller made the aviation department’s annual budget presentation to City Council members, who praised the airport’s ongoing capital improvements — including terminal upgrades and a consolidated rental car facility that’s being worked on now — but wanted answers on what San Antonio could do better.

“If I had $10 for everyone who talked to me about the need for nonstop flights, I’d be retired and living in France,” District 9 Councilman Joe Krier said during the Aug. 19 session, noting that Austin had nonstop service to London and was launching nonstop service to Germany. “What are these other cities doing that we’re not?”

Krier elaborated in an interview with the San Antonio Express-News.

“The airport is one of the crown jewels of the city’s economic development effort,” he said. But he added that he had long felt the city hasn’t been “maximizing its value in half a dozen areas.”

He echoed the frequent complaint about the lack of nonstop service to Boston and Reagan National Airport in Washington, D.C. How can a city that calls itself “Military City USA,” Krier asked, not have direct flights to that D.C. airport?

He said he’s told Miller and others, “We’ve got to be more aggressive in our approach than we have been in the past.”

There are several reasons San Antonio is losing passengers to Austin, Miller told the council.

For one, the San Antonio International Airport lacks a large enough runway to accommodate trans-Atlantic flights. For another, Austin has a lot more business travel.

As far as adding nonstop destinations, he said the bottom line is that airlines base decisions on where to fly on passenger demand.

“What drives your enplanements ultimately is how your economy is doing,” Miller said. “That’s a major factor for the airlines as they plan the distribution of their aircraft.”

Adding more cities to the flight boards may take a mix of more aggressive city marketing and incentives such as guaranteeing airlines seats will be sold, even if the city has to buy them to meet the promise, Miller said. SAT, meanwhile, has done what it can to keep cost per passenger for the airlines competitively low, even though that has translated to lower revenue.

SAT has been competitive with commuter service to Mexico, Miller said, even drawing passengers from Austin. And he said San Antonio has a good chance of becoming the between-coast point city for travel throughout Latin America. He said airport officials were enlisting members of the city’s Hispanic Chamber of Commerce to make that happen.

But Ramiro Cavazos, CEO and president of the Hispanic Chamber, said he was concerned to hear Miller make that announcement before talking about it with the chamber.

“Not that we have a problem with that; we had already been talking about it,” Cavazos said. “I think it’s a basic courtesy, if you want us to be involved, ask us to be involved.”

Contreras, in an interview with the Express-News, said securing nonstop service to Boston was now the airport’s top priority, and the city was looking to the San Antonio Chamber of Commerce to try to enlist support from the business community.

“The carriers want to have a demonstration that the market exists, more so than government entities (offering incentives),” he said. “That’s not necessarily a sustainable practice.”

Boston has been targeted because it and San Antonio have strong ties in biomedical sciences, tech and other realms, he said. Forty chamber members already have said they would like to partner in some way to win nonstop service to Boston.

“It’s a great fit for a lot of the businesses that we have here,” he said. “It is also an area where we already have more than 100 trips per day. … And it is currently the largest region for which we have no nonstop service.”

He said the business community’s help could come in a variety of different forms.

“It could be ‘I will commit to more marketing dollars in Boston so people will travel to and from,’ or it could be some business saying, ‘I will hold more meetings in San Antonio so that my colleagues in Boston will travel to San Antonio,’ or it might just be, ‘I will fly more,’” Contreras said.

The airport also has its eye on nonstop flights to Reagan, but due to federal regulations limiting air travel to the “short-haul” airport, it will take assistance from members of Congress, Contreras said.

Ticket prices are another challenge.

Brad Seitz, president of Topaz International, which audits airfares for corporations, calculated fare averages for San Antonio and five other domestic cities for a report that aired on Texas Public Radio. He compared San Antonio with airports in the New York, San Francisco Bay, Chicago, Seattle and Washington, D.C., areas. While fares are highly variable, he found San Antonio on average had the highest-priced tickets, by $52 to $106.

He told the Express-News that San Antonio fared better with flights to Mexico City, coming out $43 cheaper than Austin and $173 cheaper than San Diego, but $31 more than Phoenix.

“It really boils down to supply and demand,” he said. “Whether or not one competitor over another may be driving prices down because they’re having a ‘sale’ or something to that effect, to me it’s driven by the airlines’ ability to maximize their revenue based upon seats and demand.”

For companies with employees who travel frequently, fare prices are a major concern.

Lauren Cox, director of internal communications at Rackspace, works at Rackspace locations in San Antonio, Austin and London.

While she loves the convenience of Austin’s nonstop to London, she doesn’t always use it because of cost. For example, she purchased a ticket with a transfer in Chicago on the way out and another through Houston for the flight home for a recent trip because it saved her about $700.

“We have a lot of international travel because we’ve got offices everywhere,” she said. “Rackspace is quite conscious about how much we’re spending on travel expenses. … They’ve got to draw a line in the sand somewhere.”

The San Antonio airport has a lot going for it, she said, especially when comparing times to clear customs with Austin.

Austin, she said, feels crowded, “not big enough for how many people are traveling through.”

“They have massive lines,” she said. “Just to get through (Transportation Security Administration) is horrific on a Friday afternoon. San Antonio is actually a breeze to get through in comparison.”

Taylor’s and others’ talk of a regional airport comes amid long-term master expansion and improvement plans at both airports.

Jim Halbrook, spokesman for Austin-Bergstrom, noted that the airport is less than 20 years old and sitting on 4,200 acres, less than of half of which is developed. It’s currently in the middle of a $240 million project to add eight gates to its current 25, which will take airport capacity from 11 million passengers yearly to 15 million passengers. The master plan through 2020 calls for building that to 45 gates.

“We will begin preparing for our Master Plan update in 2017, and anticipate that the update will be complete in 2020,” Halbrook said in an email. “The 2020 Updated Master Plan will identify facility needs, based on forecasted numbers of passengers and aircraft operation at AUS for year between 2020 and 2040.”

Miller said the San Antonio master plan approved in 2010 will take it from its current 26 gates to 50 gates, with double the terminal space.

“At least until 2040, this is the airport for San Antonio,” he told the council at the Aug. 19 session.

Still, Cavazos, Krier and others said they agreed with Taylor that a regional airport may be the solution to both cities’ growth in the long term.

Taylor told the council she’d met briefly with Austin Mayor Steve Adler and asked “if he would be open to discussion of a regional airport, and his answer was yes.”

“That could be the answer for us,” she said. “As far as from a historical perspective, if there were any missed opportunities, that was probably it. Maybe 20, 25 years ago, we should have had a very focused discussion with Austin.”

Tim Tuggey, an attorney with offices in both cities who has been active on several San Antonio planning boards, said he envisioned an airport that could be reached from either city in the same amount of driving time and on routes allowing 85-mph speed limits. He said it also could work in conjunction with inter-city passenger rail.

“I think Ivy Taylor should jump on this, like ASAP,” he said.