The Crested Butte News Serving the Gunnison Valley since 1999
“The people in this room could be the shining example”
“Having the seats is one thing—filling them is another…”
So said Jonathan Houck, Gunnison Valley Rural Transportation Authority (RTA) chairman, as the board kicked off a conversation about marketing the air program during its June meeting. The RTA is contributing $325,000 in guarantees to help ensure that select airlines will fly into the Gunnison airport.
The broader question is whether the RTA can or should be involved in marketing the program, and if not, whose shoulders it should fall on.
“What we’re trying to do is keep our focus on what we do,” Houck said. “I don’t see us becoming the marketing arm of the air program. We do want to make sure every resource is available to our partners.”
Jane Chaney, director of the Gunnison-Crested Butte Tourism Association (TA), said it’s up to the RTA “to be the catalysts that ensure there is cooperative marketing, to ensure this entire valley is in a partnership. We have very poor collaboration between a number of entities in our valley. The people in this room could be the shining example.”
Jeff Moffett, director of central reservations and revenue management for CBMR, said negotiating contracts with the airlines, especially Continental, eats up a lot of time.
“Kent and I have traded some information and one of the challenges we’ve had is we want to jump in on the marketing, and do more marketing for more plane seats,” Moffett said. “Our time has been so consumed with getting the contracts… We’ll make sure that we’re covering all our bases and working with Jane at the TA. I wanted to have more to present, but time’s gone out the window with contracts, and every other day there will be new twists to talk about.”
Airline consultant Kent Myers of Airplanners LLC spoke about “four-wall marketing” and asked how effective people are at marketing to visitors when they are here.
“How are you educating the people that are here in the summer?” asked Myers. “There is a list of inexpensive things we can do, and we’re not doing a very good job with any of them. The other thing I stressed to Jeff, when I was working in marketing [at Winter Park and Steamboat], we did not have enough money in our budget and enough muscle to get things done.
“CBMR needs to create relationships with the community, people with risks, business owners—they all need to be engaged in this, and CBMR can’t do it all,” Myers continued. “I think CBMR spends a lot of money on 2-for-1, friends and family, etc. I think if you told someone, ‘I’ll give you a $100 bill to fly out of Gunnison,’ they’d probably take it. We haven’t had enough time to talk through it all.”
“What I hear specifically is the RTA will help with looking ahead and not just behind,” said Houck. He said the key is being proactive, versus “just evaluating seats filled after the fact.”
The consensus was the marketing program needs to be a collaborative effort between CBMR, the TA, and the business community. While the RTA will help facilitate those relationships, they don’t see themselves in the position to market the air program.
