Archive for July 25th, 2008
July 25th, 2008
A full plane is going to Indianapolis for the Allstate 400 at the Brickyard. Sometime between 12:30 and 3:30 p.m., the last ticket was sold. Here’s an update on RFD’s other day trips:
Any day trippers out there? Why are you taking advantage of these opportunities?
July 25th, 2008
In a fit of marketing genius, Chicago Rockford International Airport shows on its Web site how many seats are left on its upcoming day trips. Here’s the noon 12:30 p.m. tally:
- Sunday trip to Indianapolis: 130/131 seats sold, one left!
- Aug. 7. to Mount Rushmore: 69/131 seats sold. It’s not moving as fast as others, and it needs sales to continue strong for the trip to happen. But airport officials are confident that if this doesn’t work out, an overnight trip would. We’ll see how the first attempt goes.
- Aug. 10 to Niagara Falls:
56/131 64/131 seats sold in three hours. They’ve hit on something here. The first two Niagara day trips sold out in a day or less, so if you’re thinking of this one, don’t wait
- Aug. 14 to Mackinac Island:
25/131 31/131 seats sold in three hours. The previous trip also sold out in a day, so these may go fast too.
Are any other airports doing anything like this? Not that we can tell. First off, I don’t know of any other airport that effectively operates its own airline, so others don’t have this flexibility (they’d have to convince an airline to fly each trip). But this could catch on. If RFD averages six sold-out day trips a month, 10 months a year, that’s 7,800 outbound passengers a year the airport didn’t otherwise have. That’s almost an extra month of passengers in their totals.
Also, the airport isn’t making any money off these trips. The goal is to break even, to keep public attention on RFD, to give passengers a taste of the “hassle-free” experience with the hopes they’ll return for scheduled service. It also means RFD is charging the lowest possible price it could given fuel prices.
This is a fascinating and, so far, wildly successful idea. Let’s see how it grows and catches on elsewhere.
July 25th, 2008
Oil down around $123. Some rumblings that it may have fallen too far, too fast, but the demand drop and associated increase in gasoline supplies are for real … coupled with the start of a rebound in the dollar, and the fundamentals have changed. So a drop was justified, but how much and for how much longer? I think it could keep going a bit or it could bounce back a bit, but my slightly, slightly, sliiiiightly educated guess is that it doesn’t go up a a lot for a while…
Fuel prices also down again (Numbers courtesy of AAA’s fuelgaugereport.com):
Gasoline: Rockford dropped three cents to $3.90 a gallon, a full 30-cent drop in just over a week. Our prices are also lower than they’ve been in about two months. We’re tied for tenth in the state in gas prices. The Illinois average dropped more than two cents to $4.09, almost 16 cents below last week’s record. The national average dropped two cents to $4.01, 11 cents below last week’s record. Illinois has the 13th-highest gas prices in the nation (including the District of Columbia).
Diesel: Rockford dropped more than a cent to $4.72, 14 cents below the record set in May. We have the sixth-highest diesel prices in the state. The state average dropped a cent to $4.79, seven cents down from last week’s record. The national average dropped more than a cent to $4.77, down seven cents from last week’s record. Illinois has the 20th-highest prices in the country (including the District of Columbia).
