Airline fares down, flight numbers up at Lynchburg Regional Airport

By Bryan Gentry

Published: September 10, 2008

August saw two sudden changes at the Lynchburg Regional Airport.

First, ticket prices to the airport’s top 26 destinations tumbled by nearly 60 percent.

Then the number of passengers using the local airport took off by the hundreds.

Those changes could help the airport regain market share it had lost to other airports.

“We’re back in the game,” said Airport Director Mark Courtney. “We’re certainly very competitive with other regional airports now.”

Every other month this year saw steep decreases in customer traffic compared to the same months last year. In July only about 6,500 passengers used the local airport, a 20 percent drop from July 2007.

The airlines serving Lynchburg — U.S. Airways and Delta — responded by cutting their base fares in Lynchburg. The airport has seen round-trip fares under $200 to some Florida destinations, and around $270 for Las Vegas and San Diego.

The price drop had its desired effect. August’s passenger traffic was 6.9 percent higher than the same month one year ago, according to figures the

airport released this week.

With nearly 10,000 passengers flying into or out of Lynchburg in August, that was a jump of 52 percent from July.

Courtney said it usually takes six weeks or so to really start seeing results from reduced fares, so he is looking forward to more business this fall.

Although fares are subject to change, Courtney expects them to stay low long enough for the airlines to fully measure their success.

For years the Lynchburg airport has struggled to keep up with the commercial airports in Roanoke, Charlottesville and Greensboro, where airlines have traditionally set lower fares.

Courtney said he has seen some Lynchburg fares $400 more expensive than flights at those airports. Such prices drove about 40 percent of flyers in the Lynchburg area to use other airports, a 2007 study showed.

The problem was compounded by the direction of the airline industry. Most airlines were cutting seat capacity so they could raise prices.

The Lynchburg airport has lost about 50 percent of its seat capacity since Sept. 11, 2001, Courtney said.

But even while reducing seats and flights and raising prices in Lynchburg, “our load factors, or the percentage of seats filled, remained remarkably high,” Courtney said.

That’s not the right statistic to convince airlines to add flights or cut prices, he said.

But a number of economic factors caused the business at the airport to change this year.

The national average domestic fare in the first quarter of 2008 was 4.4 percent higher than in the same time frame last year, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation.

Another Department of Transportation report showed that of airports serving more than 50,000 people per year, Lynchburg had the fifth highest fares for the 12 months ended March 31.

As the year continued, high oil prices continued to push up airfares. In June, the lowest published fares to Lynchburg’s top destinations averaged $622, Courtney said.

Those fares, combined with high gas prices and people spending less money, finally affected airport traffic. “We had a terrible July,” Courtney said.

During July, U.S. Airways experimented with some fare sales, and had enough success that the airline revised its fare structure.

Specifically, it changed its advance purchase requirements, which lowered fares for passengers booking their flights seven to 21 days in advance.

Delta followed suit.

The new average of the lowest fares to Lynchburg’s top destinations went down to $258, a 58 percent drop from June’s prices.

The airport has been advertising a number of those fares: $298 for a round-trip to Seattle; $262 for Las Vegas; $188 to Orlando.

Finding those fares can be tricky, depending on travel days and destinations. An online ticket search for a one-week trip starting Oct. 1 yielded a $169 fare to Orlando but $408 to Seattle.

Courtney said the quickest ways to find these fares are on the Delta.com and USAirways.com. However, some of the fares are on priceline.com and travelocity.com.

He hopes those fares continue so that the airport can keep increasing business. “While this might be an initiative that’s designed to turn around our traffic numbers quickly, it has to be sustainable,” he said.

The increased passenger traffic could help him attract a third airline or more flights, which would be in the long-term best interest of the airport.

“Clearly with these kinds of fares, we could use some more seats right away,” he said. “They’re going to fill up quickly. Hopefully we can see that translate into some more flights.”