Airline provider seeks service input

Mesa Air Group will begin offering round-trip flights from Columbia to Kansas City and St. Louis on Oct. 5. The question is: Will anyone board them?

Mesa owns Air Midwest, which will operate the US Airways Express flights to and from Columbia Regional Airport. Mickey Bowman, vice president for planning at Mesa, believes opening the dual hubs and reducing ticket prices will cause local use of the airportto increase.

And he thinks the service to Kansas City is important to that growth.

“Service out of St. Louis has actually been contracting over the last few years, and Kansas City is actually growing,” Bowman told the Airport Advisory Board during a special meeting Thursday morning. “There has been an influx of low-cost carriers such as AirTran, Frontier Airlines and Southwest.”

All flights on US Airways Express will cost $59 each way, regardless of which connecting airline a passenger uses. Under AmericanConnection, the airline that US Airways will replace, passengers receive a steep discount on flights if they connect to American Airlines, regardless of whether American offersthe most competitive price for the connection. However, if passengers choose to connect to a different airline or stay overnight in St. Louis, the price would be higher, said B.J. Hunter, chairman of the Airport Advisory Board.

“Some people might think that the initial cost sounds higher, but now you can find cheaper connecting flights than you could before,” Hunter said.

But for people to take advantage of the new service, they first have to know about it. Both the Airport Advisory Board and Mesa are aware that marketing the airport will be as important to boosting traffic as the new flights.

While in town, Bowman is meeting with civic and business leaders and MU representatives to learn how to better serve the community and market flights.

Although Bowman did speak about initiatives that have worked in other cities, such as providing free tickets in exchange for advertising, some on the Airport Advisory Board noted that marketing the airport isn’t only Mesa’s job.

“The airport is owned by the city,” Hunter said. “It has a responsibility to promote it, especially with the new destinations.”