My Airport’s Business Constituency

Depending on an airport’s size and type, there are a number of different ways to collect information about the role your airport plays in directly supporting community business activity outside of the airport itself. The My Airport Is Not an Island topic introduced three ways in which your airport can support economic activity throughout your region: by facilitating long distance freight deliveries, by providing long distance/fast connectivity for business travel, and by providing visitor access to hospitality industries. This topic focuses on the first two airport functions, describing 1) business reliance on air cargo to ship products to market, and 2) business reliance on aviation for business travel. Visitor Spending effects on regional hospitality businesses are addressed separately in the next topic, Visitor Spending. In both cases, economic reliance can be described in terms of the jobs, wages, and business revenue that are considered reliant on service provided at the airport. This type of description does not assess what would happen should air service be eliminated in a region (i.e. if a nearby airport would be able to meet the company’s needs at some cost premium compared to the current airport), but rather presents a snapshot of the current economic contribution of an airport to certain regional business activities. The process discussed below can be applied to document the various businesses that use your airport and the ways in which they depend on your airport’s services. In many instances, an airport may wish to employ a local academic institution or a consultant to assist in this effort. If you are interested more broadly in describing how businesses depend on airport activity but do not wish to undertake a study specific to your airport, ACRP Report 132 The Role of U.S. Airports in the National Economy, offers national level data on the value of U.S. air cargo exports, as well as qualitative information from interviews with air reliant businesses. For general aviation, a survey of based aircraft owners registered to businesses can be used first to describe the scale of economic activity associated with the businesses, and second to identify the portion of business activity that is considered dependent on aviation. Under tools, you will find example surveys of this type. Commercial airports have larger business constituencies that are reliant on the airport for air cargo and passenger movements. Because of the scale involved, multiple methods of data collection may be appropriate. For a commercial airport with GA operations, the survey approach described above may still prove useful. Collecting data on the value of air cargo movements is one way to specifically describe the role air cargo plays in supporting business activity in your region. The value of goods shipped from your region through your airport to customers in the rest of the U.S. or the world represents the value of production of industries in your region and business sales from your region facilitated by air service. The value of inbound goods arriving by air also has some relationship to economic activity in your region, but this relationship is harder to pinpoint directly. Some inbound goods serve as intermediate inputs to production for local businesses, thus supporting the subsequent sale of final products. Other inbound goods may be products sold directly to consumers. If importing by air means that certain products are available at a lower price than they otherwise would be, this creates a value in the form of consumer surplus that can be spent on other things within the regional economy. In most cases, reliance on inbound goods is only described qualitatively or assessed by means of surveys and interviews of specific businesses. Some studies employ larger scale surveys to investigate business reliance on aviation for activities such as business travel that are not already captured by based aircraft owner surveys or the value of air cargo movements. In general, the population for these surveys is selected to target industries that have been shown to be particularly reliant on aviation (see the Identifying Airport-Reliant Businesses worksheet). From there, the analyst can choose a number of approaches including: targeting only major employers by sector, targeting all employers over a certain size, or consulting Chambers of Commerce and local business associations to identify key businesses. When using both a survey of based aircraft owners and a broader airport-dependent business survey, it is important to check that the same business is not surveyed and counted twice. In addition, companies in accommodations and food industries are typically excluded from this analysis, as they overlap with the companies affected by Visitor Spending. In the list of tools, you will find example airport-dependent business surveys. As was previously described when discussing on-airport impacts, it may not be possible to collect information on wages and business revenue directly. Information on jobs by industry sector can be converted to estimates of the associated wages and business revenue, as described in the Inside My Fence topic.