NIAGARA FALLS — The head of a company offering low-cost passenger flights out of Niagara Falls International Airport warned Tuesday of the need to ramp up the community’s marketing efforts.

During a meeting of a committee formed to finds ways to increase traffic to the county’s $32 million airport terminal, Direct Air President Ed Warneck described the business climate in the Falls area as “stale” and suggested some creative approaches should be adopted soon to promote Niagara County and all it has to offer.

“We can’t sit still on this any longer,” said Warneck whose airline offers weekly non-stop flights between Niagara Falls and several destinations to the south, including Myrtle Beach, S.C. and Palm Beach, Fla.

Warneck and members of the committee have been working on a marketing plan for the airport since the new terminal opened last year. During Tuesday’s meeting, Warneck reported that his company, which recently added Palm Beach flights to its list of Niagara Falls offerings, has enjoyed success since coming to Niagara County in 2007. Since then, Warneck said Direct Air increased the number of people booking flights in the Falls from 16,000 the first year to 39,000 last year. To date in 2010, Warneck said the airline has provided flights to 45,000 people, with another 21,000 confirmed bookings in place and several more months left in the year to do additional business.

Although the numbers are encouraging, Warneck said the future success of Direct Air’s Falls operation depends a great deal on the community’s ability to sell itself as a tourist destination. He said his company strongly believes in the potential for growth in the Niagara Falls area, not only in the services it offers, but also in the number of airlines operating inside the county’s new terminal.

“We know we can’t make it on our own,” said Warneck, whose company is currently the lone provider of scheduled service out of the Falls facility.

Warneck recommended that members of the committee — which includes representatives from the Niagara Frontier Transportation Authority, the Niagara Tourism and Convention Corp., the Niagara USA Chamber of Commerce and the Niagara County’s economic development office — find creative ways to boost the level of private and public sector involvement in collaborative promotional campaigns. He noted that in communities like Palm Beach and Myrtle Beach business and governmental leaders combine marketing dollars to sponsor advertisements. Those ads, he noted, focus on drawing visitors from other parts of the country, including Western New York. Warneck suggested Niagara’s leaders consider investing more marketing funds into similar campaigns in community’s outside the region. He agreed to bring marketing officials from Palm Beach to the committee’s next meeting so members could get a firsthand account of how the community’s promotional team generates revenue and allocates advertising dollars.

“In order to start driving traffic here, we have to start marketing in the destinations we are flying from,” Warneck said.

Several committee members agreed on the need to change some aspects of the marketing approach.

Pascal Cohen, manager of aviation business development for the NFTA, and William Vanecek, the transportation agency’s director of aviation, both stressed the need to improve the quality of offerings currently available to air passengers and airline operators alike. Cohen said the NFTA has met with numerous officials from airline companies in Europe who have said they would be more interested in doing business at the Falls airport if the community had more appealing vacation packages in place. Cohen said the operators prefer packages that offer their customers a full week’s worth of accommodations and entertainment at a reasonable price. Cohen lamented the fact that in Niagara County those type of packages simply do not exist right now. He recommended the committee reach out to local hoteliers, restaurant owners and attraction operators in an effort to develop more attractive specialty packages.

“The perception is there is not enough to do,” Cohen said. “We all know that there is.”

Vanecek suggested the committee invite representatives from the Buffalo Convention and Visitors Bureau and tourism representatives from southern Ontario to the group’s next meeting. He noted that the best way to increase the average traveler’s length of stay is to give them more to see and do not only in Niagara County, but in the surrounding area.

“I think it is going to take more than Niagara Falls,” Vanecek said.

Henry Sloma, chairman of the county’s Industrial Development Agency and acting chairman of the NFTA’s board, said part of the issue in promoting the airport involves finances, noting that the committee does not exactly have an “overly generous” budget at this time. Niagara County Economic Development Commissioner Sam Ferraro said the committee’s efforts depend upon contributions from member entities with a pool of dedicated revenue, roughly $230,000, available from the state, county and Niagara Falls Bridge Commission. Ferraro said he plans to draw up a formal budget plan that will be presented to committee members at their next meeting.

Sloma said he thought many of the ideas under consideration by the committee made sense and it was time to begin following through on them. He suggested that since lack of financing continued to be a concern, that a pilot program testing the success rate of targeted marketing campaign in perhaps one community like Palm Beach might be a good launching point.

“I think we have a good idea what we need to do, we just seem to be having trouble getting started,” Sloma said.

State Sen. George Maziarz, R-Newfane, who organized the airport marketing committee, has submitted legislation to divert $100,000 in casino funds currently earmarked for the development of an Underground Railroad heritage area in Niagara Falls to airport marketing efforts.

Kevin Cottrell, project coordinator for the so-called North Star Initiative, attended Tuesday’s meeting and said he thought airport marketing and underground railroad heritage area development can and should be approached simultaneously. He added that he believes his project will add to the number and quality of attractions in the Niagara area, giving airport marketers more ammunition as they work to promote use of the new terminal.

“The reality is people are looking for more things to do,” Cottrell said.

Melissa Morinello, the NTCC’s new director of marketing, said the county’s lead tourism agency recently financed a new campaign aimed at encouraging people living in places like Ohio, Pennsylvania and other parts of New York to visit Niagara County for the Fall season. She said she believed her agency could get more involved in promotions tied directly to air travelers and in the development of affordable vacation packages designed to keep visitors in the area longer.

“There’s definitely things we can do,” she said.



Contact Mark Scheer at 282-2311, ext. 2250.