As the Baton Rouge Metro Airport released a new study last week designed to measure its passenger “leakage” and explore ways to address the problem, business leaders in New Orleans confirmed their yearlong effort to secure a coveted nonstop flight between New Orleans and London had fallen through.
British Airways, with whom business leaders had been negotiating, decided instead to send its newest 787 to San Jose, California, where, as GNO Inc.’s Michael Hecht conceded, “the business market is more developed than in southeast Louisiana.”
The timing of the two airport stories was coincidental, says Business Report Editor Stephanie Riegel in her latest column, but they’re not unrelated.
“Southeast Louisiana has two struggling airports within 90 miles of each other, though one is struggling more than the other. New Orleans’ Louis Armstrong International Airport, abbreviated MSY in the industry, is trying to become a truly international airport, and maybe even a hub one day. Baton Rouge, or BTR, is just trying to increase the number of direct flights it offers. It has four,” Riegel writes in her latest column.
In an era of airline consolidations and increased competition among airports nationwide, Riegel wonders if Louisiana can grow both of its largest airports.
“Should we even try?” she writes. “It’s a difficult question, and Baton Rouge will have to do some soul searching to come up with answers. The BTR study, which was prepared by consulting firm Emergent Method, essentially lays its findings at the feet of the local business community and looks there for help solving its problems.”
The problems are considerable, Riegel notes. Some 63% of Baton Rouge-based air travelers—those who live within a 50-mile radius of the Baton Rouge Airport and, therefore, should be using it—are opting to use the New Orleans airport instead.
“BTR officials view this as a dark cloud with a silver lining: They see an opportunity to recapture a share of that market by going after the business travelers who are ‘leaking’ to New Orleans and convincing them to make BTR their default airport,” Riegel writes. “The report suggests targeting the business community with a three-pronged approach.”
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