Beginning on June 1, pending approval from the Department of Transportation, Alliance will see a new airline begin serving the community by providing essential air service at the Alliance Municipal Airport.
The Alliance City Council took action on Jan. 21 to approve an agreement with Contour Airlines to provide essential air service, so long as the agreement is approved by the Department of Transportation. City Manager Seth Sorensen emphasized that the new agreement in no way reflects anything against their current provider, Denver Air Connect, noting that the city was looking for expanded options to gain more of a competitive edge in attracting people to utilize the Alliance Municipal Airport. He explained how the Essential Air Service Program works.
“We’ve been very satisfied with their service,” said Sorensen. “We are covered, because we are a small community, we don’t have a huge airport, and across the nation, there are small airports just like ours that have commercial service through a program called Essential Air Service. Basically, it is a stipend, or a subsidy for these airlines to serve these small communities.
“As part of that, they bid this out every two, three or four years, depending on how long of a contract is agreed to,” Sorensen said. “We’ve had Denver Air Connect, I believe, for six years. The reason we’re looking at this now is because their two years is up. The DOT bid this out, and one of the requests we had made as part of that bid was to go with a larger aircraft, or more flights per week. Our thinking behind that is just because, I think our flights are at full capacity about 75 percent of the time.”
Sorensen said they made the request based on feedback from customers who have shared concerns about being able to book a flight due to the airplane only being able to seat nine people per flight. He said that they are currently losing customers to Scottsbluff or Denver based on that. He believes this request for a larger aircraft would attract more customers to utilize the local airport.
“We think we have some pent up capacity, some additional people that would fly if there were assurance that they could get a flight,” said Sorensen.
Sorensen explained that there were four companies total that bid for the service, with a total of seven different options to choose from: Boutique, Denver Air Connect, Contour Airlines and Skywest. Contour Airlines bid with a 30-seat jet, which was the recommendation provided to the Alliance City Council Members.
“Hopefully, that would prevent anyone from ever having to reschedule a flight,” Sorensen said. “We hope that we will have some additional people flying just because we have more capacity. Looking at the people we have flying out of here right now, we’re actually capturing quite a bit of traffic out of Scottsbluff because our tickets are quite a bit lower, and our time of flights is better.”
Sorensen said that Contour Airlines has indicated that they will be able to keep a similar flight schedule and that they will be able to offer similar prices to Denver Air Connect, though that is subject to their decision if the contract is approved by the Department of Transportation.
“If they’re good to their word, and we have every reason to believe they will be, it gives us a bigger plane, while maintaining our schedule and maintaining cost for tickets, which really puts us in a strong position for competing with Chadron and Scottsbluff.”
One unique aspect of this contract with Contour Airlines, Sorensen explained, is that instead of the Department of Transportation having the contract with Contour, the contract would be between the City of Alliance and Contour, with the DOT reimbursing the city. To manage this, the council will have to do a budget amendment. Sorensen said that it could be as late as May before the contract is approved by the Department of Transportation.
“We’re moving forward under the assumption that DOT will accept Contour and we’ll be working on the budget amendment in the mean time,” said Sorensen. “We tried to answer everybody’s questions at the meeting. I think this represents a really big opportunity for Alliance to capture some of the customers that we’re not currently serving. I’m really hopeful that this is going to be a success.”