Transcript:

Hi, I’m Jim Galloway. I’m the Executive Director of the Valdosta Lowndes County Airport Authority, and also the Manager of the Valdosta Regional Airport. What I would like to talk to you today about is a new feature we have on our website at www.FlyValdosta.com called the Total Travel Calculator. What this feature does is it allows the person to go out and look for their airline tickets at the various prices that they can find out there. They come to this widget that we have that’s linked from our homepage, and you can compare from Tallahassee, Jackson, Atlanta, Orlando, and Tampa to what it would cost out of Valdosta. The big thing at Valdosta that we like to pride ourselves on is free parking and free Wi-Fi.

So if you look at the calculator widget that we have, you can put in your information that you have for Valdosta. Let’s say the ticket is $300. We have a place where you put in the gas prices of the day, or whatever you think it’s going to be, and we would just put in an algorithm or just an estimate that everybody’s car gets 20 miles a gallon. So it’s going to figure the fuel cost. Then also the cost for parking with us it’s $0, but you put in how many days you’re going to be on your trip. And also there’s a field at the bottom that says your hourly income. What that really is, is how much do you think is your time worth when you’re spending your time on the road driving to and from an airport? Then you click on the other airport that you want to compare traveling from Valdosta to and from, and it will automatically load in a nominal parking charge, if they have a range of parking charges, it’s not the most expensive, it’s not the least expensive, it’s something kind of in the middle. And the distance to the airport from Valdosta, and then you put in the same information. And at the bottom then it will give you a total of the actual to cost compared flying from Valdosta to flying out of one of those other airports that you have selected on there. We hope this feature will give a very more accurate picture to our folks.

One of the biggest concerns that I hear is that it’s more expensive to fly out of Valdosta than it is out of say Jacksonville or Atlanta. Well that may be true in some cases, but I would say that when this feature first came out about three weeks ago, I did an experiment one night and two of our most traveled destinations are Baltimore, Maryland, and Las Vegas, Nevada. And so I sat down with 21 days in advance, and I compared us to Jacksonville and Tallahassee and in all cases for both of those destinations we were cheaper than that. And that particular case I entered in $20 an hour is how much you’d say my time would be worth when I was traveling. Try to keep it apples and apples. But for employers that are trying to figure out if they want to put their employee on the road, how much time do they want them to spend on the road versus they can come right here in Valdosta.