Last winter’s chaos at Vancouver International Airport had a cascading effect across the country and Kelowna wasn’t spared.
With cancelled flights causing passenger backlogs, numerous Okanagan residents found themselves snared in excruciating long waits for flights or simply stuck far from their holiday destination. It was such an ordeal that the Monday announcement from Vancouver International Airport about a $40 million investment to avoid that path in the future was met with enthusiasm in the Okanagan.
Sam Samaddar, Airport Director at Kelowna International Airport, said they were consulted as the report was made and the regional impacts caused were addressed.
“Vancouver is our busiest city pair so we looked at how many flights were cancelled and the (issues created) from a regional connectivity perspective,” he said. “We were shut down from getting to the west coast.”
In an effort to mitigate the issues at the time, the Kelowna airport commissioned buses to shuttle passengers to Vancouver. It was an unusual measure and one that could occur again, though other problems should be addressed with the new approach.
“This won’t solve every extreme weather event. Weather will be weather, there will be cancelled flights and you do have regulatory issues around safety, with respect to landing limits, but I think what it will help is managing customer expectations better.”
More direct communication is a key part of the plan with money going toward new staff, training, better leverage technology and investing in additional equipment to keep more aircraft moving and passengers informed. And Vancouver passengers being more informed will be better for Kelowna passengers and airport staff.
“When we look at the aviation system as a whole, we are interconnected, what happens in one region can have impacts on other regions and that, of course, impacts customer journey,” Samaddar said.
“What I thought was positive comin gout of this, from a customer experience side, there are many agencies that provide service to a customer but they’re looking to the airport to take that together and have one voice to provide information to customer, even though the airport may not control the majority of it.”
It’s something that’s been known intuitively for some time though isn’t always in practice at all airports.
“Of the area that was clear in the report was the issuance and collection of data and sharing of data between agencies,” he said. That he said, would lead to better decisions in terms of resources on day to day operations.
And, he said, this kind of coordination is becoming more urgently needed with changing realities of passenger traffic post covid and climate change causing more extreme weather events.