July 22, 2006

Charley Farley is Back


Good to have Charley back.. Let me address one of his points regarding Frontier.

The original $100,000 paid to IMG resulted in them recommending 6 airlines. One of which was Frontier. Since that time we have paid an additional $100,000 from the Small Community Air Service Grant to help us recruit an airline. One would assume that IMG would recruit one of the airlines that they themselves recommended, thus I can only assume that Frontier has been contacted and presented. At the same time since we never get any updates on the status of any negotiations, who really knows.

At the same time I do not think we would have much of a chance with Frontier. Their hub is in Denver and they are mainly a West Coast/Mexico. The only flights to the East are to major airports and currently have no destinations in New England. I just see Worcester, a secondary airport, being a hard sell..

Think we need to focus on a couple daily flights to a major hub that is closeby. Check out our petition at:

http://www.petitiononline.com/ORH/petition.html

2 comments:

Joe Gargery said...

Bill said:

"The only flights to the East are to major airports and currently have no destinations in New England"

This is precisely why I think they should be recruited.

Right now Frontier has 0% of the New England to Devner market, although that was notes as a top destination.

Startup costs for a Worcester operation should be much lower than startup costs in a primary airport.

Bill Randell said...

Charley:

I hope that I am wrong and that IMG is talking to Frontier and they start flights to Denver tomorrow.. Right now I am just looking at it as to where we have the best chance.

JetBlue has ten flights per week from Boston to JFK... The market exists, there problems with tunnel and Logan is our partner..

If we can not convince JetBlue (or some other airline) to divert some of their daily shuttles to JFK, how are we going to convince Frontier Airlines. Not saying Frontier is not worth pursuing, but with 343 days left we need to spedn time on our best chances.