In November, Allegiant Air announced it will begin 30 new nonstop routes. Two of these routes include Columbia, from which aviators will be able to travel to Orlando and Destin, Florida starting in June. That announcement came after United Airlines returned to COU in September, with flights to Chicago and Denver. And just last week, COU announced more flights to Charlotte, North Carolina, which will also start this summer.
“Airlines collect mountains of data. They know quite a bit about you,” said Glenn MacDonald, who studies corporate growth at Washington University’s Olin School of Business.
It’s the role of an airline employee called a network planner. They look at how many of the seats on the plane can get filled, airport location, passenger frequency, type of plane and more to make decisions. Network planners design and adjust an airline’s route map to maximize revenue while minimizing costs.
MacDonald says airlines also keep an eye on their competitors. Watching markets or geographic regions grow and shrink, they begin to plot potential new routes.
“If American [Airlines] is thinking about adding a flight, if United is already there, it’s looking a bit crowded, so they’d be less likely to do so,” MacDonald said.
Finally, the airlines look at the region itself. If a city begins to boom, say with the relocation of a corporate headquarters, it might grab an airline’s attention. MacDonald mentioned Columbia’s unique geography as a college town nestled in-between Missouri’s two-major airports, St. Louis Lambert and Kansas City International.
Airlines might consider the travel needs of students, their visiting parents, and professors. MacDonald said if the airport wants to attract their business, COU’s flight plans would need to offer convenience — in time or money — over St. Louis and Kansas City.
While airlines are the ones who make the final decisions on where they fly, airports try to make themselves appear as beneficial locations for airlines to work with.
Mike Parks is COU’s airport manager. He says he meets with airlines at air service conferences to pitch Columbia and build relationships. These conferences are similar to a career fair: each airline sets up a booth with their network planners awaiting airports eager to join their network.
Park has a tight 20 minutes to pitch COU. He gives updates about the successes of current routes while he campaigns for additional flights.
“We want to paint that picture of growth within the community, and it’s really easy for mid-Missouri,” Parks said.
The Federal Aviation Administration publishes forecasts that track and project business growth for airports across the country. One metric for measuring growth is counting enplanements — which records how many passengers board an aircraft.
Larger economic factors play a role in who flies and when. After the 2008 recession, more people flew through COU than before. However, the COVID-19 pandemic dealt a major blow to COU’s enplanements, from which the airport is still recovering. The FAA expects COU to continue to grow and see almost 150,000 boards from its gates by the year 2030.
Parks said airport growth is often a matter of momentum: more enplanements, more airlines, more destinations. Hey says he hopes that this momentum carries COU into more successful flight bids in the near future, with Charlotte and Phoenix on the horizon.
