NW Arkansas airport expects ebb for holiday

— At Bill and Hillary Clinton National Airport/Adams Field in Little Rock, travelers will celebrate this year’s Thanksgiving holiday season the same as passengers at most airports across the nation.

They will arrive early, probably stand in long lines and slog through the heaviest traffic travel days of the year.

Not so at Northwest Arkansas Regional Airport at Highfill, near Wal-Mart Stores Inc.’s home base of Bentonville. That airport’s passenger numbers during Thanksgiving week are normal — or even on the light side.

That’s because the airport, the nation’s 112th-busiest, serves close to 70 percent business travelers, compared with the national average of about 60 percent, said Scott Van Laningham, the airport’s executive director. Business travel dies down during Thanksgiving week, he said, and even an influx of homebound University of Arkansas students can’t fill the void.

Thanksgiving “is a big week for a lot of airports. But for us, it’s not,” Van Laningham said.

“Honestly, I never noticed much difference in the airport at Thanksgiving from a random weekend,” said Lisa Pruniski, 21, a University of Arkansas senior who’s scheduled to fly out of Northwest Arkansas Regional to Louisville, Ky., for the holiday. It will be her fourth such trip in four years.

“It’s so quick. Going through check-in, getting my tickets, going through security and to the gate took 14 1/2 minutes. That was my sophomore year,” Pruniski said.

Contrast that with Clinton National Airport, where travel agent Ellison Poe of Little Rock warns her clients about the Thanksgiving backup.

“There are times in Little Rock where the lines to go through security will be down the escalator,” she said. Poe, of Poe Travel, points to the Sunday after Thanksgiving as the worst of the worst — “hands down one of the most traveled days of the world.”

Passenger counts at Clinton National bear her out. Airport officials expect 4,680 passengers on that Sunday, Nov. 25, spokesman Shane Carter said. That’s projected as the airport’s busiest day surrounding Thanksgiving this year. A more typical Sunday earlier in the month carried 3,373 passengers. The airport projects the second-busiest day to be Wednesdaywith 4,283 passengers, up from about 3,400 on earlier Wednesdays in the month.

Little Rock airport officials, like most others nationally, “expect next week will be the busiest travel time of the entire year,” Carter said. Clinton National is ranked the nation’s 85th-busiest airport.

Kelcie Lawson, a 19-yearold sophomore at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, has been told by co-workers to arrive three hours before her flight. She’s never flown out of the Little Rock airport at Thanksgiving, but has experienced the holiday’s crowds at the Tulsa airport.

“I remember the lines to get into the kiosk were really packed,” Lawson said. Then she changed planes at Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport “and it was worse.”

The scene won’t look like that during this Thanksgiving week at Northwest Arkansas Regional Airport. Barring bad weather or other complications, passenger numbers won’t grow, although leisure travelers — for once — will dominate.

Gone will be business travelers flying solo with their carry-on luggage, Van Laningham said. In their place will appear families with bags to check and children to hold close. And they are sometimes less-experienced fliers. “Unlike business travelers who know exactly how much liquid they can carry on, the discretionary traveler may not,” he said. Airport workers tell themselves “to be a little more understanding,” he said.

As in Little Rock, Northwest Arkansas Regional expects its busiest day of the extended holiday weekend to be Sunday. Officials project 2,000 travelers that day. The count for a normal Sunday is about the same, however — 1,900 to 2,200.

If not Thanksgiving, what are the busiest travel days of the year at the Northwest Arkansas airport that some call Wal-Mart International?

Two of them are the day of and the day after the annual Wal-Mart shareholders meeting, Van Laningham said, which this year was on June 1. That Friday and the next day, the airport counted about 3,000 passengers, compared with the usual 2,000.

Business, Pages 27 on 11/16/2012

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