Lack of air routes can leave region’s business grounded

Spokane business leaders know the way to San Jose. They just have to convince an airline to get them there.

The restoration of direct air service to the San Francisco area has been a priority since United Airlines dropped the route three years ago. If you aspire to be a community on the forefront of new technologies, as Spokane does, you must have easy connections with the Silicon Valley, whetstone of all that is cutting edge in the United States. San Jose ranks ninth among destination points from Spokane, but all those passengers connect through Seattle or Portland.

Todd Woodard, spokesman for Spokane International Airport, says Bay Area flights come up in conversations with every one of the airlines that serve Spokane, and some that do not. “It’s a very serious hole in our service,” he says.

Horizon Airlines President Jeff Pinneo was on the spot Friday during a meeting with the Spokane Regional Chamber of Commerce. Chamber President Rich Hadley says the city has not quite shown the potential to generate revenues that would justify new service, but Horizon would also be reluctant to let a competitor get into the market.

“He understands it’s a priority,” Hadley says.

What difference does nonstop service make? Itron Inc. spends more than $5 million on air travel annually, with about one-third for destinations accessible from Spokane. But, says Business Operations Manager Kathy Stuart, the company has not held its annual customer meeting here because bringing those 500 people into Spokane entails too many hassles.

“We’d love to bring people into Spokane,” she says, but, “It’s just a huge disruption.”

Adds Stuart; “We really miss our direct connection to California.”

Passengers can reach 16 cities directly from Spokane if seasonal service to Honolulu is included.

Mark Sixel, an airline consultant based in Eugene, Ore., says the availability of nonstop airline connections ranks among the top three factors executives consider when assessingrelocation or expansion. While a single two-hour layover in Salt Lake City awaiting a connection to the Midwest may not seem like much in itself, multiplied hundreds of times over for every executive or sales representative, the extra time and expense add up quickly.

“They’ve got other clients and other things to do,” he says.

Direct connections allow companies to get sales representatives in and out of a market in a single day. Sixel notes the experience of a Eugene company that makes trucks that spray mulch. The introduction of direct service to Phoenix allowed the company to send salesmen south, and bring customers north to see the trucks in action. The result: Sales soared 40 percent in one year, with most of that attributed to Phoenix-area buyers.

Such two-way relationships can build economies at both ends, and airline traffic in the middle.

In two years, Horizon has tripled its flights between Boise and Sacramento, California’s capital and a refuge for many companies fleeing Bay Area congestion. The Idaho capital also has direct service to Houston. Those connections give Boise a leg up on Spokane in recruitment, and just generating more business activity in general.

“Nonstop service is a huge tool to increase connectivity between two markets you would not otherwise think would be linked,” Sixel says.

He says airlines will accept losses on a new route for six to nine months. If they have not reached break-even at that point, the carriers will re-assess. Communities have taken the risk out of new service by offering incentives, sometimes as revenue guarantees, sometimes as a pre-purchase of tickets.

To get Delta to establish direct service to Salt Lake City, for example, Eugene put up $2 million, most of that in the form of revenue guarantees. Wichita committed $3.5 million in revenue guarantees to bring a low-cost carrier into that market. Officials there estimate that money has saved consumers $50 million by forcing competitors to lower fares.

Commitments to buy tickets, or use the service, helped convince Big Sky Airlines to launch daily flights between Spokane and Olympia in November 2002, and sustained the thrice-daily service during its long ascent toward break-even.

Woodard says Spokane is reluctant to use incentives because they only assure service for a short time. If a route makes economic sense, an airline will fly it. The dollars are better spent doing cooperative advertising that alerts travelers to new service, he says.

Securing new service also takes time, almost two years in the case of Frontier Airlines, which will start twice daily nonstops to Denver next week. New direct flights to Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Salt Lake City and Hawaii have also been added since October.

Nonstops are important to business, but all passengers benefit. Take travel to Mexico, which used to entail flights to Seattle, then Los Angeles for connections south. Now tourists can make connections to 13 destinations in Mexico through Phoenix.

“Within a few hours you’re down in Cabo San Lucas on the beach,” Sixel says.

Sigh.