Moville high-flyer speed dates
for Ireland
28.09.07
Moville and Greencastle
know him as a keen golfer and water sports enthusiast
but when he's not relaxing at his Foyleside holiday
home, Cormac O'Connell is busy as head of aviation
marketing for Dublin Airport.
Here he tells Paul O’Kane of 'Connections', the
airport's inflight passenger magazine, about growing
business at what is now one of the top 15 airports in
the world for international traffic. |
“IT'S like speed dating
with airlines,” says Cormac O’Connell with a laugh.
O’Connell, who is head of aviation marketing with Dublin
Airport, is talking about the annual routes conference
in September when senior airline executives and airport
operators get together. “You have a series of 20-minute
meetings with airlines and you make your pitch,”
O’Connell explains. Clearly possessed with stamina that
the average speed dater would envy, O’Connell recalls
that he held 27 one-to-one meetings with airlines during
the two-day conference while another member of his team
had 20 ‘dates’.
Like any speed dating veteran, he’s also pragmatic about
being rebuffed. “Once you get a no from somebody – and
it’s never personal, they just aren’t interested in what
you’re selling – you move onto somebody else.” With
facilities at Dublin Airport stretched by the huge
growth in passenger numbers in recent years, you could
be forgiven for questioning why the airport bothers to
market itself at all. But this is a rather simplistic
view, according |
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to O’Connell. He points out
that the gestation period between an airline first
thinking about launching a new service to Dublin and
actually welcoming the first flight is often several
years.
And while facilities are stretched currently, the DAA
has embarked on a €2 billion investment programme to
expand, improve and modernise Dublin Airport. The
investment in a new terminal, new boarding gates and
eventually a new runway means that additional capacity
is coming down the tracks. “You can’t simply turn the
tap off we have to keep talking to the airlines. We
can’t stick up a sign and say I’m sorry Dublin Airport
is full. Can you imagine the reaction if we did that.
The tourism industry wouldn’t be too impressed and what
would it say about the Irish economy as a whole,” he
says.
The marketing team’s key focus at present is on bringing
new long-haul routes to Dublin, as the advent of T2 will
create additional long-haul capacity. Long-haul
passengers tend to stay in Ireland longer and spend more
while they are here and - depending on the route
-additional long-haul traffic can be more easily slotted
into the less busy periods at Dublin Airport. The annual
routes conference in September and autumn and winter
scheduling conferences give O’Connell and his team “a
good feel” for what the airlines are thinking. Aside
from formal and informal meetings at the three big
annual conferences, O’Connell talks regularly to network
planners for the major airlines, be they existing or
possible future customers. “You’ve got to meet your
customers and keep meeting them.” |
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Network planners are the
key decision-makers for Dublin Airport’s aviation
marketing team as they weigh up the amount of money that
is being made from each route and the competing
attractions of new destinations. “They are the guys who
make the decisions to stay or to go,” he says. As you
would expect, the conclusions are arrived at
dispassionately and the bottom line always wins out.
“It’s about bums on seats and the yield [the price per
seat] that the airlines can achieve.”
For this reason, research is O’Connell’s bread and
butter. His pitch to a prospective airline is never
`Dublin is a great place to be’ but rather ‘fly here and
you’ll make money’.
He argues that it would be wrong to think that he and
his team were banging the drum selling Dublin Airport.
“I’m not marketing an |
airport: the airport is
just the place where the planes take off and land. I’m
marketing Dublin, Ireland, the Irish economy, Irish
tourism, our international trade and a host of other
factors that make us an attractive location. We then
pull all this information together to make a compelling
story about the overall appeal of flying routes into
Dublin. We let the market research led us into what is a
credible story.”
O’Connell and his team keep on top of economic data and
liaise closely with the major trade and tourism
associations. Passenger and cargo data are also
monitored. “We look at who is doing business here
currently and where that business is going. About 80% of
the cargo flown out of Dublin is what is known as belly
hold cargo, which means that is it carried in the hold
of normal scheduled flights. When you know where that
cargo is going and its value you quickly get an
understanding about the income that certain new routes
could generate.”
Passenger movements are also closely monitored. Through
detailed passenger surveys and information from
airlines, the DAA can track the exact final destination
of travellers. Historic onward connections data for
example showed that there was a huge demand for a direct
flight from Dublin to San Francisco. About 75,000 people
per year were flying from Dublin to San Francisco, but
they were either changing in London or in the US onto a
San Francisco bound flight. Solid tourism and trade
traffic underpinned this route. San Francisco is the
natural destination for Silicon Valley and Ireland has a
large IT industry. San Francisco and the Bay area is
also a hugely attractive tourist destination with a
large Irish community
All this pointed to a lucrative market in the Dublin-San
Francisco route. and with the recent Open Skies
liberalisation of the rules governing air traffic
between Ireland and North America, Aer Lingus will
launch a San Francisco service this autumn. The data
drives the routes as the two other new Aer Lingus routes
to the US – Orlando and Washington DC – are also in
Dublin Airport’s top 10 onward connections locations.
The advent of Open Skies will bring further new routes
to the United States and to Canada and O’Connell is also
already talking to long haul carriers about the impact
of another major change to the rules for flying between
Ireland and the US.
Currently US-bound passengers clear American immigration
in Dublin, but a new system will mean that passengers
will also clear US customs in Dublin. Dublin and Shannon
will be the only airports in Europe to offer this
facility. “The ability to offer CBP [customs and border
protection] in Dublin will be a big attraction,” says
O’Connell. “It will open up the entire US market as
airlines will be to fly from Ireland to any domestic
airport in the States.” Other international flights from
Europe will have to land at international airports in
the US and these have much higher charges than their
domestic counterparts. Clearing CBP in Dublin also means
it will be much easier to transfer onto a connecting
flight once in the US.
While Shannon will also have this CBP facility,
O’Connell does not see Dublin in competition with
Shannon. “Our competition was never Shannon or Belfast,
my target airport has always been Manchester Airport and
how it has developed.” He adds that while Manchester
Airport used to be much larger than Dublin, that is no
longer the case.
O’Connell argues that while the huge growth in passenger
numbers created the capacity problems for Dublin Airport
that are now being addressed with the €2 billion
investment programme, they also moved the airport and
the country into another league. “When you hit 10
million passengers per year that’s the first hurdle, but
when you have more than 20 million passengers as we now
have, you’re a serious player. Most people don’t realise
it, but Dublin Airport now has more international
passengers than JFK.”
Despite being one of the world’s top 15 airports for
international traffic, O’Connell still occasionally ends
up talking to an airline executive who is a little
unsure of his provenance. “They think that we are
Iceland rather than Ireland!” He used to mention U2 to
clear up any misunderstanding but now as he deals
increasingly with airlines in the Middle East and the
Far East he finds that Enya works better. |
Go East!
Adding new long services to the East is a key
medium-term target for the aviation marketing department
at Dublin Airport, according to Cormac O’Connell. The
DAA’s onward connections research shows that
destinations such as Bangkok and Singapore are already
hugely popular out of Dublin Airport. But perhaps
surprisingly, Beijing is even more popular as a current
destination. “We are doing 55,000 passengers a year to
Beijing, all of whom are travelling out of Dublin and
then connecting elsewhere.”
Although few people might realise it, Beijing is
actually a slightly shorter flying distance than Los
Angeles so a direct Dublin-Beijing route is a realistic
goal. “We are talking to a number of airlines |
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about this route. There’s a
good mix of traffic on the route with 38% of people
visiting friends and relatives and 33% travelling for
holidays,” adds O’Connell.
Crunching the numbers also shows that there is huge
demand for flights into South East Asia and beyond to
Australia. The DAA is currently talking to airlines in
Singapore and Thailand and the huge demand for routes
into South East Asia and beyond is also one of the key
factors behind the recent decision of UAE-based Etihad
to launch a service from Dublin to Abu Dhabi.
Etihad is partly marketing the route, which currently
operates four times per week, as the fastest way from
Ireland to Australia as it offers a single stop in Abu
Dhabi and the a direct non-stop service to Sydney.
Etihad’s decision to launch a Dublin route was due in no
small part to the airline’s chief executive James Hogan
and previous pitches made by the aviation marketing team
in Dublin. Hogan was previously chief executive of Gulf
Air and knew the potential of the Irish market as Gulf
launched its own service to Dublin. Due to a reduction
in its international network Gulf recently exited the
Irish market, but the work that Cormac O’Connell and his
team put in with Gulf helped land Etihad, as Hogan and
some of his team had already been convinced by the Irish
story.
The Etihad boss is bullish about the potential of the
Irish market. “There’s huge demand out of Ireland,”
Hogan said in July when Etihad launched its Dublin
service. O’Connell is the first to admit that it can be
a long slow process to convince a new entrant to
consider the Irish market, as just because an airline
does not say no, doesn’t mean it is saying yes. He has
been in contact with executives in one large airline for
more than 10 years. The airline is interested in Dublin
but has yet to launch a service. O’Connell remains
confident that it’s a matter of when rather than if.
Even when the hard work pays off, it can take several
years. He started talking to US carrier Continental in
1993 and it launched its Dublin service on June 16,
1998. The US airline now has routes out of Dublin,
Shannon and Belfast. “They launched on Bloomsday and
they’ve been blooming every since,” according to
O’Connell.
InishowenNews.com would like to thank 'Connections'
editor Neil Hayes and reporter Paul O'Kane, for the kind
use of this article and photographs. |
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