Economy lifts Sonoma County’s airport
The worst part of traveling for Santa Rosa resident Adam Lee is having to drive to San Francisco International Airport. The 69-mile trip can take up to three hours when the traffic is bad — and the traffic, he said, is always bad.
“This week I had a flight that left out of SFO at 8:50 a.m., but I felt like I needed to leave at 4:30 to get there in time,” said Lee, the owner of Siduri Wines.
But fortunately for Lee, his local airfield, Charles M. Schulz-Sonoma County Airport, is all of a sudden experiencing tailwinds. An airport with a dinky 15,000-squarefoot terminal named after the “Peanuts” cartoonist might seem like a punch line. But to big airlines like American and United, which are scrapping for market share and trying to find ways to grow, small airports like Santa Rosa’s are no joke.
“In 2012, we projected that in 2025 we would have 540,000 passengers coming through the airport,” said Jon Stout, the airport manager. “But last summer, we changed that projection to ... 500,000 in 2018.”
Two years ago, Alaska Airlines was the airport’s only carrier, flying to Seattle, Port-
land, Los Angeles and San Diego. Today the airport has four more — American Airlines, Sun Country Airlines, Allegiant Air and United Airlines — and nine destinations, including Phoenix and Minneapolis.
Officials have attributed this spike in demand to a perfect storm of a good economy and a boom in tourism. Sonoma County, an attractive Wine Country destination, has become even more popular in recent years. From 2014 to 2015 alone, the county saw an 11 percent increase of destination spending, the amount of money visitors spend during their stay.
“Right now, the Bay Area is really hot,” said Joe D’Alessandro, president of the San Francisco Travel Association. “We’re in good shape as long as the economy stays strong.”
The Santa Rosa airport is not the only North Bay airport doing well. Napa County Airport, which serves only private airplanes, has also experienced a “slight uptick” in passenger traffic in the past year, said Mark Willey, chief executive officer of Napa Jet Center, an operator handling flights at the airport. He attributes this increase to more interest in the wine business.
San Francisco International Airport, Oakland International Airport and Mineta San Jose International Airport have all added flight routes to new markets over the past year, leading to an increase in passenger traffic across the board.
When an airport as big as SFO signs up a new carrier, existing facilities are typically big enough to accommodate it: SFO’s international terminal alone, at 2.5 million square feet, is 167 times the size of Sonoma County’s passenger building. Serving four new carriers has the smaller airport “maxed out,” Stout said.
In fact, the airport plans to land so many new flights this year that a multimillion-dollar expansion plan already in the works for 2019 suddenly seems outmoded. The airport will ask the county Board of Supervisors to let it add up to 28,000 square feet, nearly tripling the terminal space.
Even then, Sonoma County residents such as Lee may still find themselves making the trek to SFO.
The short 48-mile United flight from Santa Rosa to San Francisco isn’t meant for people trying to shorten their commute — a round-trip ticket on its own can be more than $400. Instead, it intends to connect passengers to the airline’s 291 daily flights out of SFO. Skipping the drive is pricey. A trip from Santa Rosa to Denver via San Francisco, for example, will cost $200 to $300 more than the nonstop from SFO.
That cost and the frequent delays at San Francisco mean the few hours saved in the car might not be worth it, Lee said. And while there are several new flights from Sonoma County, the options are still limited. Currently, Alaska has three flights a day to Los Angeles; other routes have just one flight a day.
Still, the airport — along with Sonoma County’s $1.82 billion tourism industry — is reaping the benefits of this increased traffic, no matter how small in the grand scheme of things.
“It is very exciting,” Stout said. “If you asked me a year ago if I would have four more airlines to serve Sonoma County, I would have said no.”