Vincent Safuto: Brevard Airport Stretches Its Locale

Vincent Safuto: Brevard Airport Stretches Its Locale
Vero Beach Press-Journal, FL

December 27, 2003

The city of Melbourne has a problem, which is marketing its airport as a 
destination to European tourists who, when they think of Melbourne, think of 
the city in Australia. 

As reported recently in the Press Journal, the city plans to deal with this by 
marketing its airport in Europe as Orlando-Melbourne International Airport. The 
initial marketing effort for the flights will feature Orlando's tourist 
attractions, the city's marketing director, Larry Wuensch, says, but after a 
few months the airport will market Brevard County attractions, such as Cape 
Canaveral and the cruise boats out of the port. 
 
That is, if tourists who land in Melbourne and find themselves 60-some miles 
from where they thought they were going don't tell their friends to beware of 
the "Melbourne Shuffle," and no one else comes. 

What's going to happen when foreign tourists land in Melbourne after a seven- 
or eight-hour flight across the "pond" and then learn they have another hour or 
more of travel, by toll road, to go to their hotel rooms or to see Mickey? How 
will they get there, by bus? By rental car? Since there's no train service, as 
in Europe, they might feel "taken." 

Also, how much will it cost them in both money and time to not only travel the 
distance from Melbourne to Orlando, but also to travel back to catch their 
flight home? 

Fudging an airport's location is a risky business, and the only conclusion 
European tourists might derive after a few planeloads are conned into coming 
over is that Americans are not as bad as everyone thought —they're worse. 

The idea that all that separates Orlando and Melbourne is a hyphen implies that 
the two cities are close together, and they're not. 

It's almost as if city officials in Vero Beach decided to rename the airport 
West Palm Beach-Vero Beach International Airport and started luring Europeans 
with pictures of Palm Beach and CityPlace. 

I suppose that once they've arrived and asked where all the attractions were, 
we could have greeters point them down U.S. 1, wish them good luck and send 
them on their way with a hearty, "If you see a sign that says 'Welcome to 
Miami, now duck!'" 

Wuensch said in the article that Europeans don't know what the Space Coast is. 
Well, after they've gotten a load of Melbourne's version of geographic 
proximity, they'll know a heck of a lot more, and might tell their friends to 
beware of travel companies pitching trips to places that aren't quite what 
they're built up to be. 

Baiting and switching "rubes" may have been a Florida tradition, but it's not 
the way to build good feelings. Melbourne could have made itself more 
attractive to European tourists in countless other ways, and ended a lot of the 
confusion, by something that's not very popular nowadays, but always leaves a 
good feeling in the heart: honesty. 

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