When it comes to airline fares at Northwest Arkansas Regional Airport, passengers could be forgiven for feeling the prices seem a bit lofty.
What’s the point?
Complaints from Northwest Arkansas Regional Airport’s larger airlines about a competitor’s airport fees deserve a level of sympathy consistent with those airlines’ response to concerns about high passenger fares.
Has it really been almost 20 years since Air Force One roared in to inaugurate an airport now commonly known its federal three-letter designator, XNA? Ever since our region opened the airport in 1998, passengers have regularly had a decision to make. They could conveniently fly out of XNA or in (too) many cases, they could make a drive to Tulsa or Kansas City or Little Rock and get significantly cheaper air fares.
It's not always the case, but it happens frequently enough that the regional airport's efforts to market its services meet with friction from a lot of its potential customers. Certainly, recreational and small-business flyers feel the pain when shopping for air travel forces them to either plunk down more hard-earned cash or consider the longer drive to Oklahoma or other airports.
Some don't realize the airport has nothing to do with setting fares. Rather, the airport is designed to maintain a safe and efficient terminal, tarmac and runway where the airlines and car rental companies pay for space and time to conduct their daily operations.
Indeed, XNA officials seem to get just about as frustrated as the general public when airline fares are massively different for the same airlines at airports just a hundred driving miles apart. Case in point: a meeting of the Northwest Arkansas Regional Airport Board just the other day.
Major airlines like American and United have been crying to XNA officials about rates, but don't for a minute think it's about the fares passengers pay. No, they're mad because a smaller airline, Allegiant Air, gets a cheaper rate structure for its operation at the Highfill airport.
What the airlines ignore is the huge difference between their operations and the smaller airline's less frequent services to Florida, Las Vegas and, sometimes, Los Angeles. Scott Van Laningham, the airport's executive director, cited one measure of the difference: American and United use the airport's bag belts about 120 times a week; Allegiant might use them eight or 10 times a week. And Allegiant pays on a per-use basis in the airline's lower-rent Concourse B while the larger airlines use the nicer Concourse A.
So did the bigger airlines want a discount? No, Van Laningham said. They wanted Allegiant to pay more.
Sam Walton, they're not.
In the midst of that dispute, the regional airport board members clearly picked up on the scent of hypocrisy. Here the big airlines are, trying to increase costs for small competitor and passengers, and all the while those airlines turn a deaf ear to years of complaints that fares at XNA are often astronomically out of whack when compared to the same airlines' prices at Tulsa, Kansas City and other locations.
"There's not a link between what we charge you and what you charge our passengers," airport board member Stan Green said. "Our customers tell us it costs too much to fly out of XNA."
Naturally, the airlines responded with a frustrating truth: "We charge what the market will bear."
The corporations that call Northwest Arkansas home -- such as Tyson Foods and Walmart -- and their vendors book a lot of the seats available at XNA. Much of the time, those are last-minute decisions and the resulting airfares are steep. If Walmart and a vendor need a quick meeting, you can bet a vendor isn't going to let a $1,200 airfare get in the way of a face-to-face in Bentonville on a multimillion-dollar account.
It affects others. Van Laningham cited the Razorbacks' recent (brief) trip to the NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament. Teams were announced on Sunday for a first-round game on Friday. Fans trying to get there discovered fares of about $300 in Kansas City, about $400 from Tulsa and about $500 from Little Rock. The fares at XNA? Try $800. One of our reporters could get there for $500 out of Joplin, but he said the same time slot on the same airline out of XNA was offered at more than $900.
That's a problem for the airport. It's not a concern from the airlines' perspective.
"They look at us and say, 'But we're filling up our airplanes,'" Van Laningham said.
Still, the airport loses money when potential customers choose other airports. And the region loses some visitors when businesses or organizations choose not to hold events in Northwest Arkansas because of the cost of bringing people to the region by air.
In that airport board meeting, board member Philip Taldo used his cellphone to get a ticket price from American for a round-trip ticket to Washington, D.C. The cost was $341 out of XNA. From a different airline in Tulsa? How about $72.
"We're not blind to the fact you guys want to make as much money as you can," Taldo said. "But, to be really fair, you need to consider the people we represent. Folks don't understand."
But people do understand: The big airlines serving XNA aren't about low prices. They're about squeezing as much as they can out of a lucrative business market, leaving the leisure and small-business flyer in turbulent conditions. Airport officials say the only real solution for the long term will be attracting competing, lower-cost airlines to XNA. Airport leaders and regional advocates like the Northwest Arkansas Council continue work to attract them to the region.
We hope they succeed. If necessary, offer them incentive prices for the use of airport facilities.
Sure, the bigger airlines will complain. And the folks at XNA should respond to their complaints every bit as much as the airlines have responded to pricing complaints here in Northwest Arkansas.
Commentary on 04/21/2018