Florida Trend - October 5, 2001
By JOHN FINOTTI

Fort Myers’ super-charged airport has blown past the competition to the north and south and is shaping how the region grows.

As a young, ambitious director of aviation at Jacksonville International Airport in the early 1990s, Bob Ball shot for the moon by trying to woo an international airline to northeast Florida. In particular, he zeroed in on LTU International Airways, a German carrier. Despite his best efforts, the Germans nixed the idea of flying to Jacksonville. There just weren’t enough German tourists heading to the area to make the service profitable.
Ball, a likable, energetic sort who’s as quick with one-liners as he is with airport statistics, stayed in touch with LTU, however. And his persistence paid off — but not for Jacksonville.

In 1993, Ball took the No. 2 job at Southwest Florida International Airport in Fort Myers. He learned that the region had become a popular destination for German tourists and expatriates. Not long after arriving in Fort Myers, Ball went back to LTU with a more compelling pitch. Ultimately, Southwest Florida International Airport, now the state’s sixth-largest airport, landed LTU with direct flights to Dusseldorf. (LTU serves only two other Florida airports: Miami International and Orlando International.) Later, another carrier, Condor German Airlines, added direct flights to Frankfurt.

“Bob’s done a hell of a job attracting carriers from Germany,” says William Coulter, executive vice president of the Florida Airport Managers Association in Tallahassee. “He’ll continue to merchandise it.”

Attracting LTU and other international air service was an extension of the success that Southwest Florida International has enjoyed almost from its inception. When the airport opened in 1983, planners forecasted 3 million passengers by 1995. The airport blew past the 3-million mark just four years after the first commercial jet took off and has consistently ranked among the fastest-growing facilities in the country. Last year, 5.2 million domestic and international passengers traveled through the airport.

In the process, Southwest Florida International eclipsed airports in Naples to the south and Sarasota to the north and has become a major catalyst for growth throughout the region, says Janet Watermeier, executive director of the Lee County office of economic development. The airport is so successful, in fact, that the big community developer St. Joe Co. is using it as a model to leverage development in northwest Florida, where St. Joe has huge land holdings. (“Role Model”).

The airport is so busy that it’s outgrown its 18-year-old terminal: Today, for example, there wouldn’t be enough gates to accommodate much-sought-after Southwest Airlines if the low-fare airline came calling.

All the success isn’t just serendipity. In the late 1970s, civic and business leaders in Lee County and Fort Myers deliberately set out to dominate air travel to the region. At the time, flying into Fort Myers meant going in low over Highway 41, just above the roofs of homes and businesses. Page Field, a converted World War II-era Air Force training airfield, was penned in on all sides by development. Local leadership, with the support of the community at large, decided to roll the dice: They’d build a $68-million airport complete with a two-level terminal and a 10,000-foot runway — extensive at the time. And they’d put the airport 15 miles southeast of downtown Fort Myers.

At first, the airport project seemed hexed. A sinkhole swallowed a big chunk of the runway. The repairs added millions to the cost and garnered a fair amount of chuckling from around the country, including from a young assistant airport manager in Charlotte, N.C., named Bob Ball. Moreover, because the airlines considered the Fort Myers airport a risky venture, they were able to demand a sweet deal. Under terms of the agreement, which expires in 2008, the airlines keep all of the airport’s surplus revenue — what’s left after paying all of the bills — each year. Also, the airlines have final approval on all airport expenditures over $50,000. By contrast, at Tampa International Airport, the airport authority keeps all of its surplus revenues and doesn’t need approval from the airlines for any expenditures.

The Fort Myers airport didn’t take long to prove it wasn’t a boondoggle. Since its first full year of operation in 1984, Southwest Florida International’s annual passenger count has grown from 1.3 million to 5.2 million last year. From 1999 to 2000, the airport’s passenger traffic grew 6.3%, the second-fastest among Florida’s bigger airports after Fort Lauderdale International Airport.

The new airport, along with the extension of Interstate 75 to Naples, opened up southwest Florida to more and more visitors. “This whole region has been seeing huge volumes of tourists,” says Joe Barnes, who as Continental Airlines station manager in Fort Myers for the past 11 years has seen the airport grow.

With passenger counts climbing steadily, the airport authority in the late 1980s began pushing for a major expansion to accommodate growth. Getting the airlines’ approval for the expansion — and charging them higher fees to help pay for the expansion — was a tricky proposition, however, since the carriers were making money and in no hurry to pay more.

Cutting costs
Talks with carriers had stalled when Ball, now 49, arrived in Fort Myers in 1993. To win over the airlines, Ball says, the airport had to demonstrate that passenger traffic would continue to grow, but also that the airport was being run efficiently. “In order to justify the major expansion to the airlines, we needed to drive down airline costs and increase service and revenues,” Ball says.

Airports get revenue from airlines in a couple of ways: The carriers pay landing fees based on the weight of the aircraft. And they pay rental fees for ticket counter space and gate areas. To determine how efficiently an airport is being operated, airlines divide those costs by the number of passengers.

Airports can influence the average per-passenger cost by reducing their operating expenses and/or increasing non-aviation revenues such as parking and concession fees. Typically, fees from airlines account for about 25% to 30% of an airport’s total operating revenues. The balance comes from parking, concessions and rental car fees. And now airports are deriving extra income from leasing airport land for such non-aviation uses as industrial parks and golf courses.

From 1995 to this year, Ball, who became executive director in 1996, reduced the airlines’ average per-passenger cost at Fort Myers airport from $5.97 to $3.73, well below the national average of about $7.50. Ball and his team attracted new concessions, such as Chili’s restaurant and Starbucks, which is ringing up $52,000 a week in coffee sales. Airport staff offices were turned into shops. The airport has also controlled costs: Landing fees, for example, have dropped from $1.38 per 1,000 pounds, to $1.30.

In 1999, the airlines agreed to the expansion. After more than two years of planning and permitting, construction of a new terminal is set to begin next year, with a scheduled opening in 2005.

Remarkably, unlike big expansions at other airports, the Fort Myers project, which includes a new air terminal, parking and roadways, has generated little vocal opposition. In part, that’s because the airport is located in a sparsely populated part of the county with ample buffer. Just as important, however, is the airport’s proactive approach. For example, the new terminal will displace valuable wetlands. To meet mitigation requirements and blunt criticism, the airport authority, in a novel move, purchased 7,000 acres of environmentally sensitive marshland several miles from the airport.

It will spend $20 million over the next three years to create and maintain a natural habitat on the property, which feeds into the Everglades. “There just hasn’t been any opposition,” says Bill Spikowski, president of Spikowski Planning Associates and the former planning director for Lee County. “They’ve done a good job.”

Ball, meanwhile, continues to push the airport’s growth at the same time he faces a temporary dropoff in German tourists hurt by a weaker mark. He says he won’t let the current lack of space deter him from pursuing the likes of Southwest Airlines, either. “We’d make it work somehow,” he says.

See October 5, 2001 issue of Florida Trend for original article.