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Old Posted May 10, 2012, 9:13 PM
ATLonthebrain ATLonthebrain is offline
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Join Date: Aug 2001
Location: Oakland, CA
Posts: 427
I'll definitely be attending. Should be interesting and looking forward to the presentations. Hope there's a strong turnout.

The Chamber can act as a conduit to garner monetary support from the business community to use in air service development efforts. However, those efforts must be closely coordinated with and spearheaded by the Airport itself, not another entity. Airlines don't like to have multiple points of contact within a single community. The Airport is the natural source for an airline to directly interact with.

Begging and pleading will get us absolutely nowhere as a community. The efforts, which are ongoing and have been for some time, must be targeted and based on service which Boise and its community can actually support. Some might believe we can support all of the service which was operating in 2007, the peak year for passenger traffic here. I'd argue that we can probably only support 1/3 of the difference in seats offered then vs now. The local economy still is nowhere near where it was in 2007, and that continues to have a major influence on the propensity of people's decision to travel by air. BOI didn't lose 550K passengers because airlines reduced capacity. It was the other way around..and that's what it seems many in this community still don't understand or are unwilling to accept. It's the disappearance of passengers which caused most of the seat & flight reductions. That is, with the exception of Horizon, which was cutting service pretty heavily before most of the passenger activity decline occurred.
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