McCarran Airport: One of Las Vegas’ greatest resources

In a city that has a gift for getting the big things wrong, McCarran International stands proud as a legitimate world-class airport.

From across the pond: The Strip lights up the night behind a British Airways jet.

McCarran by the numbers

2010 passengers: 39.8 million

2009 passengers: 40.5 million

2009 ranking: 7th busiest in US, 17th busiest in world

Busiest carrier: Southwest Airlines (15.6 million passengers in 2010, 43.8% market share)

Number of carriers: 28 (12 international)

Number of flights per week: 3,343

Weekly flights on narrow-body jets: 3,077

Weekly flights on wide-body jets: 59

Weekly flights on commuter planes: 207

Most operated aircraft type: Boeing 737 (2,015 per week)

Longest domestic flight operation: Boston (2,381 miles)

Longest international flight operation: Seoul, South Korea (6,004 miles)

    Related stories

    Admit it, you’re getting tired of Las Vegas being at the top of all those bad lists: Spending per pupil. Class size. Unemployment. Home foreclosures.

    It’s no fun having to explain ourselves to our friends and family about everything that’s wrong with us. In fact, it gets downright depressing. But fear not. We do have some sources of community pride that are as good as or better than any worldwide. One is almost an afterthought because it’s been around for so long and it consistently operates at a high level — McCarran International Airport.

    It’s one of our greatest resources, thanks to good management and even better planning.

    “When you consider the volumes of people who go through there every year, it’s one of the most hassle-free airports in the country,” says Mike Boyd, an aviation consultant who works with airports worldwide to improve return on investment for owners.

    “They’ve done magic with the facility,” says Boyd, president of Boyd Group International. “I don’t know how they were able to do everything they’ve done.”

    Randall Fine, managing director of the Fine Point Group, also sings McCarran’s praises.

    “There are very few cities in the country that have an airport as centrally located as Las Vegas,” says Fine, who flies on business as a casino industry consultant as well as going through his list of 1,000 Places to See Before You Die.

    “Going into Washington, D.C., (to Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport) and into San Diego, like Las Vegas, is really convenient,” Fine says. “But if you look at the other extreme, someplace like Denver, it’s 25 miles from the airport to downtown. The convenience of McCarran to the Strip and to where people live is fantastic.”

    Randall Walker, director of the Clark County Aviation Department, notes another advantage McCarran holds comes courtesy of Southern Nevada’s dominant tourism industry.

    Most major airlines want to have a presence here because most of their passengers want to come here. As of April, 28 airlines had flights to and from McCarran. Some have lightweight schedules. Thomas Cook Airlines, for example, offers one flight a week between Manchester, England, and Las Vegas. Market leader Southwest Airlines, meanwhile, has 1,535 a week—an average of 219 a day—to and from 55 airports. When you add them all up, McCarran has 3,343 flights a week, an average of just under 478 a day, to 141 markets. The bottom line is that you can get almost anywhere, nonstop, from our airport. It also helps that McCarran is home base for Allegiant Air, which has a business model of operating a low-frequency schedule to cities the big carriers ignore. The Las Vegas-based airline averages 20 flights a day, but it flies to 45 destinations including Kalispell, MT, Laredo, TX and Fargo, ND.

    Airports that are hubs for major carriers—think Dallas-Fort Worth for American Airlines or Atlanta for Delta—have more markets. But McCarran is considered an “origination and destination” airport with fewer connecting flights than others. It’s consistently been the second-busiest origination and destination airport in the country behind Los Angeles International.

    “If you’re in Reno and you need to get to Washington, it can be horrifying,” says Rosemary Vassiliadis, McCarran’s deputy director. “We always want to have better service here, but at least you have choices. From Reno, you have to fly to Salt Lake City, Los Angeles or here in order to get to Washington. That’s pretty good service for a community of this size.”

    Even though McCarran’s proximity to the Strip and generous offering of flights are viewed by most as advantages, there are downsides.

    Because the airport is so close, it’s often cited as a barrier to the development of tall buildings. At one time, the developers of the Stratosphere envisioned the structure rising another 500 feet beyond its 1,000-foot height. A Federal Aviation Administration review put the brakes on that.

    More recently, developers of a proposed domed football stadium on the UNLV campus fretted over how tall it could be because the proposed site lines up with McCarran’s north-south runways.

    Fine notes that although you can fly to 141 different places nonstop from Las Vegas, those flights won’t necessarily be less expensive because many of the routes have no competition. For example, the cost of flying to and from Reno has nearly doubled in two years, and Southwest is the only airline that flies the route. That’s more a product of the recession than anything else, Fine says, but he still finds it aggravating that Las Vegas can have so much lift, yet costs escalate.

    “Before the recession, you could get almost anywhere,” he says. “Now, a lot of airlines have retreated to their hubs and it’s harder to get some places. There used to be 30 flights a day to New York City, but now there are fewer than ten.”

    Actually, there are 12 with American, Delta, JetBlue and Virgin America flying the route to John F. Kennedy International Airport, but his point is made.

    In addition to lift and location, McCarran has several other pluses:

    Good planning

    To stay ahead of the city’s growth curve, McCarran planners try to look two decades ahead in their master planning. That’s why managers stepped on the gas to come up with a solution to capacity problems that were mounting in the mid-2000s.

    With a presumed capacity of 53 million passengers a year and a 2007 passenger head count of 47.7 million, the county pressed to build what is now known as Terminal 3, a $2.4 billion, half-mile-long structure east of the main terminal. The new building will house 14 gates, primarily for international and long-haul domestic routes. The back-of-the-house surprise on Terminal 3 is that passengers flying from McCarran’s D gates will access their flights from the new building. That means that when the terminal opens a year from now, passengers will need to be more conscious of where their airlines are in the airport.

    An underground tram will shuttle passengers from Terminal 3 to the D gates. Walker says the system would enable McCarran to open the terminal, work out bugs and gradually funnel more passengers to the D gates over time. A major public education campaign is planned and Walker says new programmable signs on Interstate 215, Russell Road and Paradise Road near Tropicana Avenue will give passengers warning as to which terminal serves what airline.

    “We’re somewhat space constrained at our airport,” Walker says. “At Dallas-Fort Worth or at Denver, people driving to the airport have a couple of miles to figure out what lane they need to be in. Here, once you get in the tunnel or on Paradise Road, you have to begin committing to a lane.”

    International arrivals at the new terminal and an expanded US Customs and Border Protection station will be able to process multiple flights at the same time—something that hasn’t been possible at Terminal 2. That will give the airport greater flexibility to accept international flights at the times those carriers want to arrive.

    The airport’s attention to detail and long-term planning have resulted in McCarran grouping airlines in the terminals according to their respective alliances so that if a passenger has a change of planes in Las Vegas on an alliance connection, it can be done seamlessly.

    There’s only one airline club lounge at McCarran, but that will change when Terminal 3 opens. Gideon Toal Management Services will open a generic lounge and contract with multiple carriers so that passengers of many airlines will be able to use one facility.

    Technology

    McCarran has long been a leader in exploiting technology. Walker directed his staff to attend an airport technology standards meeting of the International Air Transport Association in 1997 even though McCarran wasn’t on the invite list.

    “You sometimes have to be a little bold and aggressive to try to get things done, and we were and it’s paid off for us,” Walker said.

    Within a few years, McCarran had developed a common-use passenger processing system that not only delivered new single-unit boarding pass and bag-tag printing system, but also gave the airport flexibility in assigning airport gates. The system enables airlines to display information on screens that can be displayed at a different gate with a few computer keystrokes. For the passenger, it means one computer kiosk can handle multiple airlines, saving space and reducing clutter.

    McCarran also is one of the few airports that offer free Wi-Fi. The airport generates revenue with ad banners on the Wi-Fi welcome screen.

    “I got a great email from a passenger who was passing through our airport the other day,” Walker says. “It said, ‘I thanked you a couple of years ago, but I was through the airport again and I just wanted to thank you again for the free Wi-Fi.’”

    Easy navigation

    For the most part, McCarran is pretty easy to get around. Walker says his staff has had to solve several passenger flow problems over the years, many of them the result of changes mandated after 9/11.

    “If you get confused at McCarran,” Boyd says, “you shouldn’t be near heavy equipment anyway.”

    Walker says his planners have made a conscious effort to minimize transit distances, in part because the airport has more wheelchairs than others because we have a high percentage of retirees: Casinos open their arms to older, wealthier customers. McCarran once had one of the most convenient parking arrangements of any airport in the world before the Homeland Security Department required people to park at least 300 feet away from a terminal building. McCarran had about 1,500 parking spaces in a garage above baggage claim and an esplanade.

    “It was one of the best garages you could have asked for, the best customer service imaginable,” Walker says. “In an ideal world, we’d put our customers in our best parking spaces. But we can’t. So rather than just let it be empty, we came up with an idea of, ‘Let’s maximize what we have,’ so that’s why we have employee parking there and it gives us 1,500 parking spaces for our customers in our Gold Garage.”

    Gauging needs after 9/11 led to some other substantial changes at the airport.

    McCarran has 44 checkpoints and security lines now, versus nine in 2001. To accommodate them, engineers had to overcome major construction issues to build more floor space overlooking the southern baggage claim area. They also designed and built a bridge linking the B gates with the C gates that not only accommodated more checkpoints but enabled Southwest Airlines to expand its presence.

    Sal Infurnari, executive vice president of global sales for Global Experience Specialists, a major convention services company, says he’s noted major improvement in passenger flow in the security checkpoint areas.

    “It’s about on par with Chicago and much better than Orlando,” Infurnari says.

    Is McCarran perfect? Of course not, but Walker and Vassiliadis routinely survey visitors to find out where they need to focus improvements.

    Walker says he’s heard complaints about a lack of signs for international guests.

    “Our biggest international markets are Canada and Great Britain, so we haven’t had any problems there,” Walker says. “But we’ve heard from a lot of Hispanic folks who would like to have all our signs in Spanish and English. But that doesn’t do anything for our Asian and European friends who don’t speak Spanish, so it’s a challenge.”

    Walker says the solution will likely be installing signs with international symbols.

    While there are grumblings about parking, most agree the airport’s new, automated pay-when-you-leave system is an improvement. Walker still doesn’t think McCarran needs a cellphone waiting lot for people who pick up passengers at the arrival curb. He says as long as the airport has plenty of short-term parking, a cellphone lot is unnecessary. And once Terminal 3 opens, the airport will have tons of parking.

    “I think it’s a challenge for some people who would like to have free parking,” Walker says. “We’re not in the business of giving stuff away.”

    Does Walker ever think that jaded locals actually underappreciate him?

    “I guess I wouldn’t say underappreciated,” he says. “Maybe people just take us for granted a little.”

    That’s easy to do when your airport is at the very top of every list that matters.

    Real Estate

    Share