Lehigh Valley International Airport Fees Going Up

LVIA directors are going to raise fees on the four remaining airlines by 10% to meet a dwindling budget.

Concerns Facing The Airport--
* The number of flyers are down even more then last year
* The airport shot themselves in the foot over a bad land deal.
* Fewer airlines are flying into LVIA (ABE).
* Rising employee & benefits costs.
* TSA is requiring LVIA to pay for screener personnel it's reducing.


This may be so, but the real problem is there are only 3 direct flights to Florida four days a week. Passengers going anywhere must travel through airport hubs located in Detroit, Atlanta, Chicago, Newark, Philadelphia or Charlotte. Travelers on these layovers could be facing flight delays. Maybe even cancellations. Then there's matter of money. For less money there are direct flights that can be had out of Philly & Newark.

It's reasonable to consider the problems facing LVIA. It's also equally reasonable to look at this from a airline passengers perspective. If one is going to be held up an hour or more for a connecting flight in one of those hubs, why not spend that hour in their car or bus to Philly or Newark where they can catch a direct flight for cheaper instead?

Couldn't be much worse then spending 45 minutes on being scrunched up in a turbo prop going to Philly for the same amount of time they could drive themselves. Same goes for riding a bus or driving themselves to Newark. Is it any wonder then that only about 20% of the Lehigh Valley flyers elect to fly out of ABE?

Raising fees 10% is not likely to improve an already bad situation. I can tell you from personal experience flying into ABE is extremely stressful. My former wife's 83 year old grandmother traveling in from Los Angeles had a stop in Chicago (O'Hare). She did it only one time and never ever again. We dove down to Philly three subsequent times both back and forth via a direct flight from/to L.A. to pick her up and drop her off.

On each of our cruises we were bumped from our connecting flights into LVIA. Both times we managed to get back on, but I was a wreck. Incidentally both flights were delayed over two hours. One flight was moved to three different gates in less then an hour. She & I were totally lost for a while in Atlanta.

Coming into Philly for our connecting flight to LVIA was no better. We had 10 minutes to make our plane two terminals away and we had no clue how to get there. If the wife hadn't met a lady who knew how to catch the runway shuttle to our 45 minute prop plane ride into LVIA we would have missed it, guaranteed. That may be normal travel to some, but for the wife and I it was hell for both of the only two times we ever flew. We both agreed we'll be damned if we'll ever do it that way again.

It took us over 7 hours to get from LVIA into to Puerto Rico for our cruise. We had to get up 4:30am so we could be at LVIA by 6:30am. This left us no time to eat anything. It would have taken us only 4 hours out of Newark or 3 hours and 50 minutes from Philly. We arrived so late in the afternoon we missed eating at the 'Wind Jammer' restaurant onboard before it closed . We didn't get to eat until after 6:00pm. We loved the cruise, but the hell started all over again when we had to return home. We left the ship at 10:30am and didn't get home (hungry once again) until after midnight.

I'm not certain how LVIA can increase business, but a coupe of things are for certain. They can't do it by making travel 10-30% more expensive and discouraging passengers by making it take twice as long to get where they need to go. I have a line of reasoning that goes something like this...* Triple the number of flights shuttling back and forth between Philly, Newark and New York airports. Forget the rest of the flights. They take too long. They are too expensive and there's no future for direct flights from here. Bag those buses!

* Make sure they're all jets. Turbo props are too small, noisy and slow.

* Over 4 times as many passengers opt out of leaving LVIA. Shouldn't that tell them something? That something being, there is a huge potential market for air shuttle services.

Why pay ground personnel to sit around all day for only a few flights. They'd be paid the same even after dozens of more shuttle flights were added?

Alternatively LVIA board members could go right on doing what they've always done (raise prices and spend vast fortunes of grant money) and pretend this time it will have a different outcome.

Here's a flash.
Air passengers don't go to the airport to eat or take in the architecture. They want to get the fastest, most convenient and lowest cost travel possible.

Missing the mark on all three of those criteria by the LVIA leadership demonstrates to me, they are unable to see the forest for the trees. This shouldn't be so complicated to understand, should it?