CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas — Kim Barrientos is glad the Corpus Christi International Airport is adding more options, but she said she likes like the idea of nonstop flights to places she wants to go.
"It needs to offer more flights, especially for direct flights to like the Midwest," she said. "Especially right now, there’s no direct flights. You have to go to Houston when they could fly to Des Moines as a direct flight."
CCIA officials are working to try and secure direct flights to out-of-state destinations past Denver, and with other carriers as well.
"Frontier, and Allegiance, and some of those carriers don’t like to just do a one city three times a week," he said. "So, what we’ve pitched to them is do three times a week to Denver, three times a week to Orlando, three times a week to Las Vegas there’s other cities that Corpus Christians want to get to.”
Visit Corpus Christi CEO Brett Oetting said his group would like to help the city get non-stop service to Denver.
"One of the things that we’re telling airlines is if you give us that nonstop air service to Denver, then Visit Corpus Christi will put considerable dollars into the market and telling people in the Denver area that they can now fly nonstop to Corpus Christi," he said.
Smith plans to travel to Las Vegas in October to meet with 14 airlines, including Amazon and UPS, as well as officials from the Las Vegas and Denver airports in an effort to try and get as much support for more domestic flights as CCIA can.
However, it'll be a while before international flights are back on the table.
"The big problem right now is that the Mexican air space has been downgraded to a Class B airspace," he said. "That basically means we cannot add any new flights on a Mexican carrier from the US to Mexico or from Mexico to the US. It’s more of a paper issue, as the FAA has explained it to us.”