Kudos to the Senate Ways and Means Committee for understanding the need for state dollars to sustain and expand air service at Wichita Mid-Continent Airport. Wednesday it sent legislation onto the full Senate committing to $5 million in state support, so long as it’s paired with 25 percent matching funds from local governments and businesses. Most valuable was this endorsement from Senate President Steve Morris, R-Hugoton, who shares Wichita leaders’ impatience with seeing Kansans fly out of out-of-state airports: “I don’t want to see any more of our dollars going to Texas. I want them going to Kansas, to Wichita,” Morris said. He can be assured that if the measure clears the full Legislature, Wichita will take those dollars and use them to generate more.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
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21 Comments
When are they going to help people who want to travel West? Too late, I already booked my flight out of OKC… and saved almost $300 per ticket!
Have fun spending that much getting there.
It will NOT cost me $600 to get to OKC. More like $20 in gas + Parking.
I guess I missed something on these subsidies to Airtran. Check the travel section of the paper on Sundays, and you will almost never see Airtran listed for lowest cost flights..anywhere.
Recently my wife and I booked some tickets..using different online ticketing services, not once was Airtran among the lowest price..to Orlando, no less.
What is up with this? Airtran gets subsidies for providing low fares, and yet they aren’t low fares?????
Air Tran certainly wasn’t the lowest fare when we flew to Orlando in 2004. I do believe the subsidies were in effect at that time and it made me wonder…..
I’m going to Atlanta in a couple of months. I checked out Airtran, but haven’t checked out anybody else yet. I need to check to see. Maybe Delta will have a cheaper flight.
I did a quick check on Cheaptickets.com and it looks like Airtran is the cheapest, but not by much.
What Airtran did was lower the prices of the other airlines, so that is the savings. I guess they might not be the cheapest, and remember, they only go to a Atlanta and Orlando, but they did lower the cost. Going East that is.
West is still a problem.
I used to get upset when I couldn’t find non-stop flights back to Wichita, but since I discovered airport bars, I’m a much happier traveler.
Let,s see, spend more taxpayer dollars to keep high airfares in Wichita. Wouldn’t it be cheaper to fund a bus line to OKC or Kc, hell even Tulsa.
Why can’t they just use the money to knock $100 off the price of every ticket, no matter what airline you use?
I’m going to Montreal this spring; socialist Airtrans does nothing for this taxpayer.
Why not just operate a commuter shuttle to KCI?
Wichita had some of the highest airfares in the country in the early 90s. Vanguard came to town and lowered the fares of the competitors. Travelors who didn’t understand the concept of a lowfare airline booked their tickets on the competitors instead. Vanguard pulled out, and airfares rocketed back up to some of the highest in the country.
These days, Airtran is fighting the same battle. They’re not losing the fight, but they’re not winning either. We are very much in danger of losing an impatient Airtran–they are not interested in our subsidies as much as growing the market. Compare the price of a ticket on ANY airline to Atlanta today versus the same price before Airtran–it has dropped like a rock. Using Airtran might cost you a few extra bucks today, but it saves you tons over what you’d pay without it. Please think long-term when you book your flights, we have GOT to keep Airtran in town. Working on a solution going West is the next step, complaining about it and somehow blaming Airtran is NOT the answer.
In all the brouhaha about subsidizing lower air fares in and out of Wichita, why is no one asking WHY the air fares are so high here in the first place?
How about going north? Or south?
Great question darkstar. My opinion is that Wichita was a smaller airline market to begin with, which lead to higher fares. Higher fares, in turn, drove customers away, further shrinking our market. It’s a vicious circle. Wichita today has one of the fastest growing airports in the nation thanks to Airtran–people are returning to Mid-Continent from out of the woodwork. Our market size is increasing, which could lower airfares itself in the future if we can somehow keep people from driving to KC or wherever.
Another factor is Wichita’s dependency on manufacturing. Factory workers don’t fly, by and large. Businessmen do, but we don’t have a lot of them around here. Airports in cities that are not that much larger than Wichita (such as Tulsa) have more destinations, more lowfare airlines, and lower prices because a greater percentage of their population fly.
Just my opinion.
Steve – if I am flying somewhere and the prices are significantly lower out of KCI why should I NOT drive there? I have never found a flight where Airtran comes even close to the best fare.
Of course, the fact that my destinations have not included Atlanta might have something to do with that. My point is, just how many airlines to how many destinations do we socialize?
Ben, I’d love to see a lowfare carrier in all four directions. Dallas, Minneapolis, Chicago, Denver, Atlanta, New York, you name it. I think West right now is a top priority because it’s low hanging fruit, ya know, a deal that might be easily workable. Getting to Atlanta first was important probably because it has the largest airport in the world–more transfer options.
Low airfares aren’t necessarily intended to be a windfall for the leisure traveler. Instead it’s an economic development tool. A commuter shuttle to KCI will probably not entice many corporations to locate their headquarters here. It’s just one more stop on the “milkrun”–KC is actually towards the bottom of the list for the number direct flights available from a major airport. Direct lowfare service to Denver, San Francisco or Seattle is much more lucrative.
We need to remember that lowfares are not just about preserving the businesses we already have, it’s about recruiting companies that aren’t here now. If a large company wants to relocate its accounting or sales office or whatever, it’s going to want to find a city that is relatively easy and cheap to get in and out of, among other factors.
As with the arena; I will continue to observe this experimant in socialism and hope it works. Who knows, perhaps someday I will even fly on a socialized carrier.
Ben, you are on a roll. Why should you not drive to KC? Well, if the price discrepancy is minimal, you fly out of Wichita on civic duty. If you’ll save a couple hundred bucks, I’ll understand in you’re in line at KCI.
We subsidize as many airlines to as many destinations as it takes to get the job done. If we subsidize too many, it’s overkill and we waste tax money. If we don’t subsidize enough, we are not an attractive place to do business.
The great thing about the bill currently under debate is that it does not use any money that isn’t already being spent on something. It’s probably being spent on something in Johnson County anyway. What a great idea to use this money to actually help Kansas interests instead of a bedroom community of Missouri. Seriously, to make Wichita a more attractive place to do business, we need to be aggressive. Economic development I understand is pretty cutthroat. There’s a ton of money being thrown around trying to entice companies to relocate. And asking the state to pitch in a help out its largest city–where 20% of its population live–I don’t believe is asking too much.
They did a report on why Wichita airfairs were so high. And they said that we are geographically challenge. Because of OKC and KC serves a population base, Wichita finds itself in the middle of these airports, not including Tulsa for S.E. Kansas, and Denver or Amarrillo for Western Kansas.
Another factor for high prices because of lack of competition, is that people like kanssaam go to OKC to fly out of.
They ask Southwest Airlines why they don’t come to Wichita. They said they would come to Wichita if there was demand, but it isn’t there because they come to OKC to fly Southwest instead.
They said, why fly to Wichita, when they will just drive to OKC.
I understand prices can be high and it is a catch 22 situation. If prices are high, people go to OKC or KC to fly out of, and since they do that, airlines don’t come to Wichita to provide competition or other destinations, because people are willing to drive to another city.
If we can bring people back to Mid-Continent to fly and bring the traffic up, then other airlines will follow. That is why they want to provide the subsidies for Airtran, to keep prices low and the traffic level up, so that we can attract more airline companies. We have a good chance of getting Southwest if we continue our traffic numbers.
And before we talk about giving away tax payers money, remember that airports are all built with tax monies and ran by government. They are like highways and bridges. A neccessary infrastructure for a growing city.
Fly Wichita and fares will go down and more destinations will come. That simple.
Joe…FYI.. I would be more than happy to save the drive time and fly out of Wichita. But not for an extra $600.. sorry, I can use that money to support our downtown ministries. If you wouldn’t do the same thing then you must have pretty deep pockets!
kansassam. Hey I agree with you. If you have a chance to save $600, I would be flying out of OKC too. I’ve done it myself.