| John Hamilton helping airport take flight |
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| Local Content - Local News |
| Written by Gerald Gauthier |
| Thursday, 25 February 2010 18:01 |
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John Hamilton’s love affair with air travel began more than four decades ago when he was just a schoolboy. It’s still as strong as ever and he's using the considerable expertise he's gained since then in aviation, tourism and marketing to try and re-establish Lethbridge as a vibrant connection point for cross-Canada and international air travel. Hamilton, 50, was recently appointed director of the Airport Enhancement and Marketing Initiative, a joint project of the City of Lethbridge and the County of Lethbridge created to reverse the trend of declining traffic at the local airport. “To become a great city, you need a great airport and I think Lethbridge is on the cusp,” says Hamilton, a former WestJet executive who built that airline's vacation division into a leading tour operator in the space of two years. “What I really want to do is bring affordable air travel to Lethbridge,” he says. A child of British diplomats stationed in countries such as Turkey, Malaysia and Australia, Hamilton attended boarding school as a youngster in England but was a frequent flyer, regularly hopping aboard airliners to visit his parents abroad during breaks in the school schedule. “My parents were in the diplomatic service, so I was flying since I was eight years old. That’s when I got the travel bug,” he says. He smiles when he recalls the log book he kept as a boy to collect pilots’ signatures. It was one of the privileges of being a young member of the Junior Jet Club organized by the British Overseas Airways Corporation - the predecessor to British Airways. Prior to joining WestJet, Hamilton helped the British Columbia Automobile Association develop into a diversified travel and tour company, nearly doubling the company's annual sales in the process. He also developed a customer service program for Fun Sun Vacations, which helped that company leap from 18th to third place in customer satisfaction within two years. In addition, a customer loyalty program he developed 17 years ago for Trafalgar Tours is still in use today. Since the late 1980s, air passenger traffic at the Lethbridge airport has dropped from more than 120,000 a year to roughly 55,000 a year. As service into and out of the local airport has dwindled, local travellers have increasingly resorted to catching direct flights to the far greater variety of destinations available out of airports in Calgary and Great Falls, Mont. What’s needed to turn things around, he says, is to rally community support and then demonstrate that support to prospective intermediate-sized airlines. “All the market data I’ve seen shows Lethbridge would support a daily flight to Toronto and a daily flight to Vancouver,” he says. “There’s basically no convention business here because there isn’t an (accessible) airport here.” |
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