It’s perhaps the biggest, or at least most expensive, single public policy issue of Aspen’s next half century. Whether or not to expand the airport and if so, by how much? Cost estimates for the proposed Aspen airport expansion range up to the mind-boggling number of a half billion dollars when the potential terminal replacement and runway widening alternatives are considered together. But one of my most recent experiences at the airport tells me there is something missing.
Pitkin County’s Sardy Field, or ASE per its three-letter airport identifier code, offers Aspen’s most proximate and rapid connection to the real world. The current ASE Vision committee charged with recommending a set of improvements to Pitkin County commissioners comprises four subgroups of local community volunteers. Its proctors — Pitkin County governmental staff and consultants — have been hashing through all the elements of the airport’s expansion for the past year. Those four groups are labeled as the technical, airport experience, community character, and focus group — the latter of which is intended to tie together, or provide focus to, the issues addressed by the other three groups.
As an outsider looking in who has never personally been involved in an airport planning process, it seems to me that all four groups are tasked with evaluating critical elements of the task at hand. But it also seems to me that something is glaringly, obviously excluded from the focus of these groups charged by the county with evaluating the expansion’s potential impact and advising on the best options to meet community and airport user needs.
The visitor’s experience — particularly those coming here as leisure travelers, spending their (or someone’s) hard-earned money to enjoy for a brief period this extraordinary place — is included as part of the airport experience group’s responsibility. But the die for that experience is often cast long before the airplane touches down. And as I observed last week, how an airport is experienced can impact someone’s travel, often as much as anything after they arrive.
In addition to focusing on how the airport functions technically, how it impacts the community and how it works internally, which are all important elements, the viewpoints of Aspen’s visitors are worthy of inclusion as central to all elements in the ASE Vision committee’s process. While the current process does consider visitor viewpoints implicitly — as described in the airport experience group’s reports calling for a warm and welcoming terminal and seeking structural improvements such as real airport gates and an environmentally responsible design — I am finding little indication in the mass of publicly available materials concerning what our visitors themselves might actually expect from an airport in Aspen.
In any case, I doubt if Aspen visitor expectations would include being dropped off in subfreezing temperatures at a closed and locked airport after midnight with extremely limited options for getting into town, following a two-hour bus ride from Grand Junction. But that is exactly what happened to a flight that I was on 10 days ago.
We live in a world where putting the totality of the customer’s experience at the center of the engagement is paramount to effective and successful business and governmental systems, and no venue more exemplifies the intersection of business and governmental systems than an airport. In 2020, the totality of the customer’s experience is not limited to the size or quality of that airport or the increasingly acrimonious issue of the size of the airplanes permitted to land there. The totality of the visitor’s experience, those seeking our hospitality, begins and sometimes is cast in the negative long before that visitor even arrives.
The fact that at least two commercial flights landed at ASE after our flight was diverted to Grand Junction a week ago Sunday notwithstanding, and without casting aspersions at any one party, the experience of Aspen’s visitors under such circumstances is not entirely the airline’s responsibility.
When Aspen’s visitors got off that bus 10 days ago their experience ceased to be the responsibility of the airline and became our responsibility, and there was nothing excellent about it. In a word, I was embarrassed to watch visitors from around the globe, some elderly, some with young children, many of whom had almost certainly been traveling for more than 24 hours, trundle off a bus at ASE into the cold dark night and try to figure out how they were going to get into a town many had never been to before.
There are a lot of good recommendations provided to date by the ASE Vision committee. While sometimes tension filled, their work has been yeomanlike and you can review it, as I have, at the website link below. But unless I missed them, two very beneficial recommendations related to knowing what our visitors actually think about the airport and treating them with the respect they deserve that I have yet to see in any of their paperwork would be:
1. Implement a visitor satisfaction survey tool, and;
2. Develop a coordinated strategy for greeting and delivering visitors to Aspen whose flights are diverted, causing them to arrive via ground transport after the airport is closed.
Thankfully I am sure only a small percentage of flights fall into this category, but that does not detract from the issue’s importance. Because such visitors are undoubtedly some of Aspen’s most unhappy, and as Bill Gates once said, they should be our greatest source of learning.
Paul Menter can be reached at [email protected].
