"Return of travelers slow as New Orleans airport comes to life"

Sunday, December 4, 2005

Return of travelers slow as New Orleans airport comes to life 
By NED RANDOLPH
The Baton Rouge (LA) Advocate

  
One of the big gripes about New Orleans, and Louisiana for that matter, has
been that the region historically exported its raw talent instead of finding
a way to keep and nurture its people.

With Katrina's wholesale export of everyone, perhaps it's fitting that the
facility that now bears the name of the city's most famous expatriate, Louis
Armstrong, will be the instrument to get New Orleans back on its feet.

New Orleans' airport in Kenner, largely spared Katrina's wrath, is slowly
coming back to life, and capable of returning to its full capacity of 166
flights a day -- if only the tourism and convention business would draw
people back to New Orleans.

"The main driver of the airport and the increase in the number of flights
has been the convention and tourism industry, and that's the industry that's
going to lead," said Dr. Tim Ryan, economist and University of New Orleans
chancellor.

"The one good thing -- and we've had a lot of bad things in New Orleans with
the oil bust and the losses of business -- one good thing is that the
tourist and convention industry has grown. And the airport has added more
flights which then support other businesses. We need to get that back."

The airport is averaging about 56 flights, or 7,000 passengers, a day. More
flights, and more tourists, will require opening more hotel rooms and
restaurants. All of that hinges on housing for staff.

Now about 20 percent of the area's 20,000 available hotel rooms are occupied
by hotel employees. The rest are taken by government workers and
contractors.

The city's large conventions -- those that require at least three hotels for
conventioneers -- have been canceled until March 31, 2006.

Until then, the New Orleans Aviation Board is playing the waiting game,
hoping enough hotels can come online to support the city's convention season
and get the airport's employees back to work along with 12,000 or so others
who count on the airport for their livelihood.

"Incrementally, we've been growing," said airport spokeswoman Michelle
Duffourc. "We've been told that after January 1, several carriers will be
adding service."

Before Katrina, the airport contributed over $1 billion a year in direct and
indirect spending to the New Orleans area economy. In October 2004, it
counted 907,000 travelers. This past October, only 194,335 people passed
through.

The Aviation Board, hoping to keep the carriers happy, lowered the fees
charged to airlines from $20 per passenger to $8, and eliminated terminal
rents.

The board also laid-off 100 of the 220 airport employees and suspended all
long-term construction projects. Yet at some point costs to run the facility
cannot be cut. The airport's $70 million budget will fall short by $30
million this year, Duffourc said.

And then there are the thousands of taxi drivers, newsstand cashiers and
baggage handlers who are left in limbo.

"It's pretty slow right now, not what it used to be," said Lucky Dog
employee Jerry Strahan as he dressed an all-beef frankfurter for a
passenger. "There's no convention business. It all depends on how many
flights are going."

Conventions account for 80 percent of the airport's traffic, Duffourc said.

"There's very little work," said Roland Mitchell, a skycap who was idly
chatting with a fellow employee at an empty baggage claim. Mitchell said
only 10 of the original 40 skycaps remain at the airport.

"Everybody is waiting on business to pick up," he said. "We're barely making
it. Everybody is trying to scrape by now."

Passengers who are coming -- many of them Katrina victims or those coming to
help in the cleanup -- have little use or extra cash to tip skycaps for
carrying their luggage.

In the meantime, Mitchell, who makes $2.13 an hour, said he fetches
wheelchairs for passengers with disabilities.

The flights that do come are virtually full, unloading clusters of
passengers onto half empty corridors.

"Normally this gate holding area is packed," said Duffourc, motioning
towards people taking up some of the seats at the end of the Northwest
Airlines gate area. "There would be three planes on the ground. This whole
area would be wall-to-wall people."

In the past ten years, the airport traffic had grown by 50 percent, much of
it tied to the city's growing tourism and convention business.

Of the millions of parade goers, tourists and conventioneers that visited
the city each year, 58 percent of them flew. Last year, the airport brought
9.7 million people into town, as many as 18,000 to 21,000 travelers per day.

Now, half of the ticket counters in the lobby don't come to life until after
9 a.m. because there are no flights from the night before.

But progress is relative.

"We were here a month ago and flew to Chicago. It was deserted," said Carol
Beynon, who was waiting for her husband on a United Airlines flight with a
handful of others at the security check.

Only one of the three news and food shops at the east terminal was open.

"This is busy," Beynon said. "You can tell it's coming back for sure."

A New Hampshire woman piling family members into a taxi bound for the Hotel
Monteleon on Royal Street said she visits about four times a year. She
postponed her birthday trip in October, and then changed her mind.

"I just feel like I need to see it," she said.

Yet few people who fly into New Orleans International these days come to
play.

"Most of the people here in town are coming to help. FEMA and Red Cross
people don't think about tourism and haunted houses," said Tony Calafelli,
who supervises the airport information booths. "Anything related to tourism
is dead."

On a recent day, taxi driver Ghassan Kihoury, said he arrived at the airport
at 10 a.m. without a fare, hoping to take someone into the city. By 3 p.m.
he was still waiting.

"Sometimes you wait three hours, sometimes five hours," Kihoury said.
"Before Katrina you had five or six loads a day. Nobody is coming now.
There's no place to live."

Just up the curb, seven empty Airport Shuttle buses were lined up with their
engines off.

Only about 70 registered taxis serve the airport. Before Katrina, the
airport had 1,250 registered taxis, enough to fill two parking lots, said
Oliver Green, transportation supervisor for L&R Security.

"Business has picked up a little better. Now we've got 60 flights a day as
compared to four or five a day," said Green, who had not taken a single day
off since the storm. The L&R staff, which also provides traffic security, is
down to 110 of its 200 employees.

"We had to hire all new employees," he said. "Our traffic people haven't
come back."

Elsewhere, L&R lost its security account for the Bayou Classic, which was
held in Houston last weekend, and Essence Festival, which is normally
scheduled for July in the Superdome.

"Fortunately, there's Jazz Fest," Green said. "We still have that."

Another saving grace -- and a harbinger for the city's tourism industry --
is Mardi Gras. Scaled down to eight days, the 150th anniversary of Carnival
is more crucial than ever.

"I'm one of those New Orleanians who would just as soon be anywhere else
than Mardi Gras, but this year Mardi Gras takes on special importance," said
Ryan, the economist.

A successful Mardi Gras would reassure convention planners deciding whether
or not to relocate their meetings scheduled for the fall in New Orleans.

But to pull it off, the area needs about 25,000 hotel rooms. Before Katrina
that area had 35,000 to 37,000, about 70 percent of them in Orleans Parish,
Ryan said.

"I don't know if we can accomplish that. Some hotels are more damaged. Some
hotels have to hold out rooms for employees," he said. "But every day that
gets somewhat better as more and more housing becomes available. The
timetable for convention industry coming back starts with Mardi Gras and
builds on that."

The goal is for the Convention Center to be completely renovated by next
summer, by then and all the hotels back in operation.

While tourism is New Orleans' bread and butter, it wasn't always so. In fact
it was called moribund in 1984, the year before the Convention Center
opened. It wasn't until the 1988 Republican National Convention that New
Orleans demonstrated it could handle big events, Ryan said.

"After that, the big events -- the Final Fours, Super Bowls, Olympic Trials
-- just exploded in New Orleans," Ryan said. "It went from being moribund in
1984 to the fastest growing industry in the region."

He said, "1988 had the demonstration effect to the rest of the world. Mardi
Gras 2006 will or will not do the same thing after Katrina. If a relatively
large number of visitors come in -- if we can handle it well with hotels and
restaurants -- if all the right things go right, we will have better
advertising than we can ever buy."

Meanwhile, the big question is whether the city can overcome the ghostly
images of desperation at the Superdome and Convention Center.

Even at the airport, memories linger of infirmed and elderly evacuees lined
up along the concourse walls and laid on baggage claim belts; the footprint
of surgery tents in the Delta Terminal, whose center floor remains marked
off by construction tape; and fleets of Chinook helicopters dropping off one
patient load after another before flying back to the stranded masses.

The airfield flooded, but drained, it allowed the commercial jets and
military transporters to move people out of danger.

"I ended up in Raleigh, N.C.," said Strahan, one of the many people who work
at the airport that were taken out by commercial jetliner. "You didn't know
the destruction until you were in the air. "

Duffourc says that many of the airliners arrived to help evacuate people and
bring food and supplies to the airport until FEMA arrived on the Thursday
after the storm.

Much of the airport's employees were also swamped by the city's
controversial residency requirement that forces airport employees to live
either in Orleans Parish or within 10 miles of the city-owned facility.

Meanwhile, 183 FEMA trailers that were hauled one-by-one for employees and
authorized personnel are waiting unused in an adjacent parking lot for the
federal agency to hook them up.

Duffourc, who has been working overtime since the storm, is tired. But she
can't walk away from the job where she has spent the last 13 years. Not yet.

"It's a lovely place," she quipped recently. "There are unhappy people here
in certain aspects. But I couldn't walk away at this point. How do you walk
away from this?"

Attached Photo:

Louis Armstrong's terminal lobby is still mostly empty as the airport slowly
comes back to life after Hurricane Katrina. The airport averages about 7,000
passengers a day, carrying mostly residents and relief workers. Before
Katrina, about 18,000 to 21,000 people, the vast majority of them tourists
and conventioneers, traveled through the Kenner facility every day.

19290_512.jpg