Quad-City Airport Shifts Focus to Business Travel

Jul. 3—The Quad Cities International Airport has been serving the region since 1935, but there's always room for improvement, according to the executive director.

The COVID-19 pandemic was particularly hard on air travel, but the airport in Moline has been slowly climbing its way back. Now, Executive Director Benjamin Leischner is involving the business community to push it to the next level.

Leischner has been with the airport since 2018, but he didn't always have his eyes to the skies. In school, he was considering a more clinical route.

"I was torn between medicine or aviation," he said.

When his twin brother went into medicine, Leischner decided he would follow his passion for aviation. He began flying commercially in college but he soon found his way into the engineering side.

Originally from Oregon, Leischner worked in New York and Colorado before heading back to the northwest, where he was planning to attend law school. Instead, Bellingham International Airport in Washington state called, offering him a part-time position as an airport firefighter.

He took a leap of faith and worked his way up the ladder, eventually being promoted to manager. He then moved on to the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, where his goal was to work his way up to executive leadership.

Along the way, he got a call, asking if he was interested in leading the Quad Cities International Airport. Leischner instantly told the recruiter no and hung up. A follow-up email helped change his mind.

"I did not know what the Quad-Cities was," he said. "Once I started to look at the pamphlet that was put together about the community, about the airport and about the position, I, for some reason, felt that it was interesting."

When he was selected, he jumped in — ready for his first job as an executive director. He spent most of his first year absorbing details about airport operations and how it might boost the passenger load.

From 2015 to 2017 the Moline airport had a loss of nearly 65,000 passengers annually. Numbers slowly climbed and, by 2019, were up 3% compared with the year before. Leischner said projects were lined up to improve the airport, and things were beginning to look up.

Then, COVID struck

"We started to have a lot of ideas teed up and to move forward with ... other ones we had to push back and focus on our workforce and getting travel reintroduced safely," Leischner said.

Despite a brief recovery period, the pandemic pushed passenger counts down by 80%.

Next came what Leischner refers to as the "COVID recovery period." Passengers were trying to decide if it was safe to travel, and the slow resurgence gradually brought the numbers back up.

"This last six months, we're kind of back to where we were in 2019. We are out of the COVID recovery phase, and we as an airport have realized where we are going to be post-COVID," he said.

During the pandemic, flights were suspended as airlines evaluated how best to use their resources. Locally, this came in the form of suspended flights to Detroit and Minneapolis. Detroit has not come back, but Minneapolis was restored, briefly.

Delta Airlines announced in August 2022 the Minneapolis flight once again was suspended. The goal for legacy airlines like Delta is to feed into larger hubs, airport marketing manager Ashleigh Davis said.

"It doesn't make sense from a business perspective to have all the nonstop flights out of a small airport like ours," she said.

From the passenger perspective, the number of available flights out of the Quad-Cities dropped. From the airport perspective, the loss of flights meant a loss of revenue.

"Obviously it's a hit because you have less activity. It's a larger denominator, and it can run up costs. But we're a little bit unique in that we are a taxing district as well," Leischner said. "We have property taxes as a backstop if we choose to leverage them."

The airport chooses not to use its full taxing power and instead is able to level the costs with parking and other user fees.

"I view that as a much fairer way to pay the bills, where you can make the decision to pay for convenience versus you have to pay because of the proximity in which you live to (the airport)," he said.

A common misconception about the airport is its power to fight back when flights are dropped, or bring on new flights in general, he said. The airlines make all the decisions, based on passenger data.

In the case of the dropped Minneapolis and Detroit flights, Delta's focus was on its larger airports on the west and east sides of the U.S. Because Delta's large hub on the east is Atlanta, Detroit was dropped in favor of having flights come through the larger airport.

As for Minneapolis, Davis said, the flight simply was not in demand as the pandemic halted travel. Similarly, with the looming pilot shortage, the airline had to decide where to place the pilot. Because the flights from Minneapolis and Detroit were not performing as well as Delta wanted, they were put on the chopping block.

"It's a disappointing thing when the airlines have to make those difficult decisions, but we are still very fortunate when we look at some of our peers in Illinois who have lost some of their routes or their airports altogether," Leischner said

Focus shifts to business travel

With the larger airlines restructuring, conversations in Moline began to shift from a focus on leisure travel to a focus on business travel.

"The best value of the Quad Cities International Airport is for business travelers, because time is money," he said.

The airport is an attractive offering for companies like John Deere, the region's largest employer. Without it, Leischner said, it is possible Deere would have to relocate to an area with a nearby airport.

"If we don't start thinking more regionally and thinking like a community of half a million, we're almost going to force Deere into a larger market like we've seen with Caterpillar," he said.

Those traveling for leisure typically want to go someplace warm, and they want to go only once a year. Business travelers are more loyal because they are constantly on the move and benefit from consistent flights.

Davis said this helped from a data perspective as well. Once airlines can see the airport is consistently filling a certain flight because of business trips, it helps the airport secure that route.

"Business travels are always going to need to go to Denver, for example, multiple times a year, versus a leisure traveler who wants to go to Cancun once every two years," she said. "That does not guarantee a fuller plane like being able to say, 'We already have 15 businesspeople that have to go to Denver X amount of times.' That means our job to fill that plane just got a lot easier."

Airlines call this load factor. To ensure profitability, they want at least 80% of the flight to be full. Compared to airports of a similar size, Leischner said, the Quad-Cities is consistently filling the routes it has available.

"It's not a question of is the demand there, it's a supply issue," he said. "If we were able to get another route or additional frequency, unfortunately, that means another community just lost something."

The power of the pilot shortage

"The harsh reality is: There's not more resources coming on necessarily, and what's out there right now is out there until they can get caught up on that string of pilots," Leischner said of the trained-pilot shortage.

But the thriving business community in the region gives him hope that the airport will continue to grow. The Quad-Cities has a rich agricultural history but is on the cusp of branching out into larger sectors.

"I think we're poised as a community to redefine ourselves around the next generation around technology," he said.

Annually, the airport contributes about $700 million in economic value to the community, Leischner said. As it serves the entire region and beyond, it's positioned as a tool to help grow the community.

"I think of the Quad-Cities is the best-kept secret," he said. "We're a lot bigger than we give ourselves credit for.

"Destinations worth visiting are locations worth living."

That mantra plays into Leischner's goals. Work is being done with the Quad Cities Chamber of Commerce to gather data and create a portfolio of what the community needs from the airport and how it can better serve the community.

Once achieved, the next step is community action, which will be needed to advocate to the airlines to add service to the region.

"The airlines all admit, 'Yeah, you're filling airplanes. Yeah, we're making money. But quite literally, there's a pilot shortage, and we don't have the resources to add a route,' " he said.

In April 2022, United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby told analysts the shortage isn't expected to improve for several years.

"The pilot shortage for the industry is real, and most airlines are simply not going to be able to realize their capacity plans because there simply aren't enough pilots — at least not for the next five-plus years," he said.

The problem hit home in the Quad-Cities in 2019. American and United airlines had three to five flights a day leaving the Quad-Cities for Chicago. During the pandemic, that dropped to one flight per day, said Davis, the marketing manager. The pilot shortage prevented the airport from returning to three flights.

Airlines are desperately trying to find short-term fixes and have even flown the idea of increasing the mandatory retirement age for pilots from 65 to 67.

"That's only going to fix a little bit of the problem," Davis said.

Increased wages, sign-on bonuses and efforts to make licensing more affordable also are in motion, but these are long-term solutions. The Quad-City airport is working with local flight schools to increase the number of pilots using the hub, but it will take time to have an impact.

"It's as much as anybody can do to create interest in aviation," Davis said, "and make sure this doesn't happen again in another five to 10 years."

Major airlines like American and United have said they are fully staffed, but Leischner argues that is because they have taken pilots from regional airports, like the Quad-Cities, in order to staff the larger hubs.

"While the major airlines and legacy air carriers are not necessarily feeling the crunch, because they are keeping the big airplanes flying, it's the smaller communities ... that are really feeling the pinch," he said.

Alternatives to consider

With the pilot shortage years away from being solved, one alternate solution Leischner is considering is increasing cargo operations.

In addition to being the executive director of the airport, he is the president of the ground-handling service QCIA Airport Services, LLC. Employees of the LLC fuel aircraft, serve as passenger agents for those who need assistance and even perform cargo operations. With online shopping ramping up, Leischner sees another way to increase revenue.

"I don't think anybody can deny the emergence of global commerce and e-commerce," he said.

When in need of a product, most consumers' first thought is to check Amazon, he said. The online marketplace has exploded in the past several years, opening the door for a new way the airport can make money.

Because of the highway systems in the region, shipment of goods to the Quad-Cities is largely by truck. About 115 miles outside the area, however, the Chicago Rockford International Airport brings in so many shipments that it ranks as the 14th-largest cargo airport in the United States, according to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics.

"As e-commerce and those same-day delivery applications grow, they're going to have to expand that network to get into the periphery markets," he said.

Historically, the Quad-Cities airport has focused on passenger service instead of cargo, which opened the doors for other area airports, like Cedar Rapids and Peoria, to take advantage.

Increasing the cargo operations at the airport is in the works, Leischner said. Many companies already have established hubs in Rockford and Des Moines, but the Quad-Cities has an advantage because it's in the middle, he said.

"We have space, and we have capacity," he said. "We're working with several different developers and companies."

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