Mile High City, mile-high airfare for Wichitans

A mid-week round trip to Denver on United Airlines out of Eisenhower National Airport can cost up to $800 — enough to stagger even a rock-solid finance department at one of Wichita’s top companies.

It’s also enough to make customers drive 90 miles to Salina for a cheaper flight — between $158 and $300 recently on a 30-seat turboprop — or make the 1,040-mile round-trip drive.

Research of data by The Eagle’s Jerry Siebenmark shows United saw a drop of more than 10,000 passengers from the first half of 2016 to the same period this year. The airline also flies to Houston and Chicago from Wichita. While the data isn’t broken down between the three destinations, it’s hard not to think United is seeing smaller numbers on the Denver route — especially when Salina’s Great Lakes Airlines had its biggest month to Denver in May.

The Wichita-to-Denver round trips are high because United has no competition for a non-stop flight. Frontier Airlines pulled out of Wichita in 2012, leaving United as the sole non-stop route to Denver.

What makes it more maddening is that customers using United as a stop on the way to a final destination are receiving competitive fairs (because there’s competition to Seattle, Los Angeles, etc.). Weekend fares to Denver are more in line with normal non-stop airfares, too.

Valerie Wise, air service and business development manager at Eisenhower, said the airport is trying to convince United to bring down its fares. Absent competition from another airline, it’s the only chance to get fares down and usage up. United is pricing itself out of many customers.

Kirk Seminoff

This story was originally published August 21, 2017 at 5:18 PM with the headline "Mile High City, mile-high airfare for Wichitans."