Residents may voice their concerns about how city officials continue to pursue tourism as a primary mechanism of local economic development by contacting their city council members.

COLUMBUS, Ga. — As was heavily reported throughout this week, American Airlines will be discontinuing their service at the Columbus Airport.

This begs the question: If tourism is saving the city as officials claim it is, then why is American Airlines choosing to leave Columbus?

The answer appears to be just as obvious as you might imagine. Here’s why.

THE REAL WORLD

Outside the confines of the tourism pipe-dream of the Columbus Consolidated Government, there exists a place called the real world. In this foreign and exotic land, businesses do not care about the toxic optimism of your failed economic development plan. They are not concerned with your cult-like sense of amazingness. They aren’t interested in your nepotistic decision biases. 

So what do they care about in the real world?

They care about whether or not your actual value proposition supports their bottom-line. Period. End of story. Welcome to earth. 

While that may sound harsh, it is a spoonful of medicine that many Columbus officials need to hear. The proof is in the pudding, and it’s now leaving an immediate $3 million economic hole in our local economy as American Airlines takes their unprofitable football and goes home. In short: pursuing ‘tourism’ that the city’s real-world value proposition could not support just cost us millions. 

How do we know this? Because American Airlines just said it.

THE HORSE’S MOUTH

In a statement by American Airlines published by WTVM, the airline is ceasing its operations at the Columbus Airport because there aren’t enough people flying through Columbus for them to remain profitable:

“Due to soft demand and the regional pilot shortage affecting the airline industry, American Airlines has made the difficult decision to end service in Columbus, Georgia (CSG) with the last day of operations scheduled for April 3, 2023. We’ll proactively reach out to customers scheduled to travel to offer alternate arrangements.”

As is made quite plain (pardon the pun) through their statement, American Airlines does not see Columbus as a profitable place for them to be in business.

THE PUNT

In an interview with the Ledger-Enquirer, Columbus Airport director Amber Clark said that American Airlines’ profitability in Columbus depends on how many seats the airline can consistently fill. Note how the wording of Clark’s statement places blame on Columbus residents for not choosing to fly through CSG instead of placing blame on her organization for not providing an offering that was valued enough by residents to want to use it:

“When airlines are looking to be profitable, they’re looking for a load factor — or the percentage of seats that are filled — to be around the eighty to mid-eighties percent, and unfortunately, our community just did not use the service enough to get to that profitable range. And with the pilot shortage, they had to cut the least profitable routes.”

Clark went on to inadvertently describe how the all-too-familiar ‘amazing’ optimism behind the city’s ‘tourism’ efforts ultimately led to the airline leaving due to a lack of profitability:

“They’ve been watching the route, and we’ve been watching the route too. We’ve been very hopeful that it would continue to do better as far as the load factors — but they gave us notice just last week that this was going to happen.”

THE HARSH REALITY

While certain branches of the Columbus Consolidated Government — such as VisitColumbusGA — aren’t going to like what we’re about to say, we are going to say it anyway: 

If your never-ending pipe dream of trying to sell a river to suburban moms with Thule bike racks — in a town where one out of every thousand residents were literally shot last year — if that plan was working, there would still be an operational route from American Airlines at the Columbus Airport.

But there isn’t. Instead, there is a new $3 million hole in the local economy as crime continues to rise and the city grows poorer and poorer. That’s on you guys. 

THE FIX

Perhaps city officials ought to consider building a functional internal economy that is capable of producing a natural value proposition first, instead of erroneously trying to force the creation of an external market that your current offering simply is not capable of supporting. 

It’s been ten years. Take your medicine. 

Residents may voice their concerns about how city officials continue to pursue tourism as a primary mechanism of local economic development by contacting their city council members.

Facts are stubborn things — and we’ll keep publishing them, whether city officials like them or not.

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