In a Friday meeting, the Asheville Airport Authority got some bad news: expenses are up and revenues are down: operating revenue for the month of January was 21.6 percent below what was budgeted, with year-to-date operating revenue down 7.3 percent. Get the details here.
Check out the airport’s long-range plans here.
5 Comments
I don’t fly often as it is only for leisure travel, but every single time I fly anywhere I look at the regional airports (Knoxville, Charlotte, Greenville, Greensboro, and Asheville) to get the best fare. I even add on the estimated cost of gas and parking to the other cities’ fares to make an even comparison, and the closest I have gotten has been about one hundred dollars more per ticket to fly out of Asheville. I look forward to being able to fly out of Asheville one day; on the bright side they do still have non stop to Newark.
One other thing to point out–the number of available seats at AVL has shrunk by only 2.5% in the last two years (2007 & 2008), according to the linked plan presentation. That is considerably less than most other airports around the country.
I disagree with several of the comments made above.
First, AVL did lose nonstop service to Orlando and Minneapolis. In the case of Orlando, Delta closed its hub there last year. Virtually everyone lost their nonstop service on DL except for a few large markets.
In the case of MSP, it was a victim of DL’s merger with Northwest. In response, DL actually added more seats to Atlanta to make up for the lost flight. And the service by US Airways to PHL and DCA (once a week on Saturdays only during the summer only) ended at least a couple of years ago as the airline repositioned aircraft following its merger with America West.
In general, AVL has actually lost fewer flights than most airports around the country over the last couple of years.
I travel regularly for work and leisure, and I can tell you that AVL’s fares are generally very competitive with both CLT and especially GSP of late. And yes, you can drive to ATL, but that will rarely ever be worth the 4 hours in the car one way.
I read a few weeks ago that the Director of the Asheville Airport had resigned to go to work for non other than Greenville Spartanburg Airport (GSP)!
GSP is actually where we prefer to fly from since it has a lot more flights and is much cheaper and pretty easy to drive to. Asheville has always been way to expensive.
Interesting but not surprising since this airport has lost a lot of commercial airline and private traffic due to the small size of the local market as well as the poor economy.
AVL offers nonstop flights to only 6 cities: Charlotte, Atlanta, Detroit, Newark, Cincinnati and Houston.
AVL has lost daily nonstop flights to Orlando, Minneapolis, as well as the weekend flights to Washington, D.C. and Philadelphia. They have tried for years, without success, to get service to even Chicago.
Even fewer flights = even higher fares.
Fares to/from the AVL airport have historically always been way too high and people are simply not traveling as much today due to the economy.
Better fares are generally always available at GSP, Charlotte or Atlanta. AVL is generally considered a boutique airport where airlines can offer few flights at high fares.
As the documents show, the airport continues to have very bullish growth projections for the future. Common sense would seem to tell them that this is simply not going to happen.
They have also received and continue to use lots of Homeland Security and other federal funds for a variety of questionable projects for a small airport of this size. At one point in recent years, the airport was trying to expand its land buying property across the airport road for a future expansion. Thankfully, that did not happen. Asheville will always be a small airport serving a small market.
Buncombe and Henderson County public officials, along with the news media and community residents, need to closely follow news and developments at the Asheville Regional Airport and its Board.