Things are looking up at Rhode Island T.F. Green International Airport with passenger counts climbing as the summer tourism season arrives and a $4.5 million marketing campaign kicks in, according to state and federal agencies involved with the airport.
Breeze Airways recently added nonstop flights between Warwick and Los Angeles, which officials say are attracting more passengers, and the R.I. Commerce Corp. says it's working with the R.I. Airport Corp. and airlines with flights to T.F. Green on marketing in "key gateway cities."
Anika Kimble-Huntley, chief marketing officer at R.I. Commerce, said in an emailed statement that the agency will end up spending about $4.5 million this fiscal year on "air service marketing" in support of Breeze and other air carriers.
R.I. Commerce says it has expended about 43% of that budget on a campaign that has included TV ads, streaming audio and video ads, online remarketing, search ads, paid social promotions and email outreach in 18 targeted cities.
Also part of the plan: installing giant replicas of stuffed quahogs, or stuffies, at some airports with connecting flights to Rhode Island to draw the attention of potential visitors to the Ocean State’s attractions. While news of the displays garnered a lot of attention in April, R.I. Commerce spokesperson Matthew Touchette acknowledged on June 14 that the displays are still in the works.
In the terminal at T.F. Green, the Transportation Security Administration reports its officers have seen passenger volume growing. On the airport's busiest days, TSA staff screen about 6,500 people a day. The agency projects it will screen 7,000 a day during the summer travel season.
"Daily passenger volumes at PVD TSA checkpoints are getting busier every week," said Daniel Burche, TSA's federal security director for Rhode Island.
Still, at the May meeting of the R.I. Airport Corp., which operates T.F. Green, agency leaders noted that while passenger volume is improving – up 7% from a year ago – the volume is just 82% of its 2019 baseline. According to the meeting minutes, R.I. Airport Corp. CEO and President Iftikhar Ahmad acknowledged that visitor traffic to Rhode Island is weaker than in other regions and there is a significant percentage of seats going unfilled.
While the state is spending $4.5 million on destination marketing, he said, other states spend an average of $22 million. For that reason, he said, he will continue to push for more destination marketing by the state.
Larry Berman, the spokesperson for House Speaker K. Joseph Shekarchi, whose Warwick district includes the airport, noted that the fiscal 2024 state budget approved by the House last Friday and the Senate on Thursday night commits $5.3 million “for marketing purposes at the airport to attract more passengers,” part of Gov. Daniel J. McKee’s original proposal in January.
This includes $2.3 million in general revenues to recapitalize the Air Service Development Fund, which reimburses marketing expenses for airlines connecting to T.F. Green, and $1.5 million from the State Fiscal Recovery Fund for tourism campaigns in destination markets, which “must be equally matched from the Commerce Corp.’s allocation of state hotel tax receipts,” Berman said.
Meanwhile, Gareth Edmonson Jones, media relations director for Breeze Airways, says the airline now flies to 12 cities from T.F. Green, one of seven bases of operations. And the airline has already hired about 80 employees at T.F. Green and is continuing to “scale up," Jones said. Four new routes to Florida are scheduled to begin in July.
“There is a lot of growth to come,” he said.
As for international routes, Jones says Breeze has pending waiver applications with federal aviation authorities to begin flights to Mexico. But routes to Europe involve more-stringent regulatory approvals.
All this can “take many months,” he said. “But we are moving along. And watching to see when we get approval.”
All of this is encouraging to tourism officials.
Kristen Adamo, CEO and president of the Providence Warwick Convention & Visitors Bureau, is confident summer travel to Rhode Island will return to normal.
Adamo also says the nonstop West Coast flights will not only bring more leisure and vacation travelers to Rhode Island but also corporate, business and convention traffic.
“This puts [T.F.] Green in a different league,” she said. “To have a nonstop West Coast flight is huge.”
But Adamo said the “paradigm shift” to remote work, which now seems more permanent than once thought, should benefit the state.
“You no longer have to live where you work,” she said. “There is [more] fluidity to travel.”
