Congratulations To Our Partner, St Vincent & The Grenadines!
Boyd Group International is excited to note that American Airlines will initiate service to the world’s newest international airport, Argyle International, from Miami on December 15.
We are proud to have worked with St. Vincent & The Grenadines for the past seven years, from a time when the airport was not much more than an enormous construction site, leveling mountains and filling in valleys.
BGI has assisted the Argyle project in a range of projects, from crafting air access strategies for American and other carriers, to accomplishing the starting-point operating budget for the facility.
This is just the start for this unique Caribbean nation with a population less than that of a third of Nassau County, and a venue that is really unique in the Caribbean.
Boyd Group International is now working hard to build additional air access to St. Vincent & The Grenadines – stand by for film at 11.
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New Forecast:
St. Louis Lambert Now Re-Classified As A Connecting Hubsite
There’s A Message Here Regarding The New Airline Industry
Boyd Group International’s Airports:USA® forecast system – the only airport enplanement projections accomplished in the private sector – now has re-classified STL as an established connecting hub airport.
Airports:USA® defines a connecting hubsite as an airport where a single airline has strategically applied resources with the objective of inter-connecting passengers, and where the result is that 25% or more of the total airport’s enplanements are connect-driven.
With the pull-down of the AA hub, the percentage of passengers being flowed over STL naturally tended to evaporate to very low teens. It was no longer a hubsite.
As of today, however, Southwest has again made the airport a true connecting hub, with over 25% of all passengers (mostly WN-driven) now simply using the facility to connect.
Please Don’t Get Confused By Outdated FAA Classifications. This, obviously, is counter to the ridiculous and obsolete use of the term “hub” in FAA nomenclature. Their description of “small, medium and large” hubs has nothing – zero – to do with anything vaguely resembling connecting passengers, and nothing whatsoever to do with any industry definition of the word “hub.” Actually, it is shameful that FAA data is founded on such ancient nonsense.
This causes unending entertainment from the media and some consumer entities who posture themselves as experts because, lo! they can pull down FAA/DOT data off the internet, and assume it has all the veracity of what Moses got off those tablets on Mount Sinai.
It does the nation no favors for the FAA to cling to these nonsensical, mislabeled descriptions. Not only veneer media types are taken for a ride, but even some of the dragon-level organizations in Washington have their policy-planning taken into the weeds by not recognizing that FAA data and classifications are strictly from the days when Lucy was doing pratfalls on Sunday night television.
One very large Washington organization actually asked us to rank “small” FAA-defined “hubs” by the percentage of connecting passengers at each.
It was a very short list.
Like, none. But there was a level of resentment when they were advised that the FAA definition was misleading them. These were their buddies across town, after all. This is the damage done when federal agencies refuse to recognize that the air transportation system isn’t a static part of the communication network.
If You Rely On Accurate Forecasts, Be In Denver August 19-21. The new STL forecast is part of the 2019-2028 Airports:USA enplanement forecasts that will be used and discussed at the 23rd International Aviation Forecast Summit in Denver, August 19-23. We’ll be exploring the trends – and their effects – on traffic levels at airports across the nation.
Any aviation entity that relies on accurate futurist forecast data should be at the Summit. In addition to clear and independent projections of enplanement trends across the nation, the Summit delivers trend and projection forecasts from the key players in the airline, aircraft manufacturing, and financial sectors.
It’s clear that FAA forecasts aren’t reliable – year after year, they have confidently mis-projected not only traffic growth, but have been mired in assuming that air traffic is just the caboose on a complex train of economic factors.
It’s Airline Strategies That Are What’s Driving Expansion. Ask any airport where Frontier or another ULCC has suddenly and unexpectedly announced they’re coming to town. The FAA’s forecasts were on another planet. That’s understandable – because airlines are now independently and unilaterally making expansion decisions that bear no resemblance to the antediluvian and inaccurate forecast methodology used by the FAA.
And that’s another dynamic that will be explored at the Summit – it’s airlines, internally and unilaterally, that are more and more calling the expansion shots.
Those 60-page consultant “studies” and ridiculous “leakage analyses” – which typically have no relationship whatsoever to consumer trends, airline fleet strategies and other issues – are no longer the driver of airline route expansion.
This means having a professional and ruthless understanding of airline strategies is a lot more important than doing some bogus “true market” study to “lure” an airline to the local airport.
Solid Data & Exploration of The Future. No other event delivers what the IAFS does… no milquetoast panel discussions, wandering aimlessly around issues. No cookie-cutter sessions delivered by wooden federal officials spouting the party line – one that’s the same at every event, and is verbatim from what’s on that department’s website.
The IAFS delivers solid futurist perspectives from the industry leaders making the decisions. Click here and take a look at the distinguished industry CEOs and senior executives who will be joining us.
Networking? No event delivers the interaction opportunities of the International Aviation Forecast Summit. The sessions are all-business, but the breaks and the outstanding evening events planned by our hosts, Denver International Airport, will be ones that no other event can match.
If you haven’t registered, we’d suggest you clear your calendar and do so now.