Officials: Partnership with UCLA raises awareness of Bob Hope Airport

Heading into its third year, an agreement that made Bob Hope the official airport of the Rose Bowl Stadium and UCLA Athletics has raised awareness of the Burbank airfield, but officials aren’t sure how that translates into its recent passenger increases.

Promotions for the “airport closest to the goal line” have gone before millions of television viewers and more than 500,000 spectators in the stadium, including during a 2014 football season that saw the highest attendance numbers in 20 years.

Online, the efforts have amassed more than 1 million “digital impressions.”

Damon Dukakis touted those figures Tuesday at a meeting of the Burbank-Glendale-Pasadena Airport Authority board. Dukakis is a general sales manager for IMG College, a Winston-Salem, N.C.-based firm that represents more than 70 universities nationwide, including UCLA.

“It’s been two successful years,” Dukakis said of the partnership, which highlights the airport in radio spots and through a logo used on signage at the stadium, during a “Bruins around the country” promotion on the video board during UCLA football games and in all print publications, such as the Rose Bowl Stadium Guide.

The airport entered a three-year, $327,000 contract with IMG College in May 2013 to tap into roughly 2.3 million Bruins fans — and their rivals — throughout Southern California and the western United States. The agreement gives the airfield permission to use the UCLA and Rose Bowl Stadium logos.

Bob Hope Airport promotions also appear on UCLA websites and social-media pages, which have more than 190,000 likes on Facebook and around 50,000 followers on Twitter, according to Caroline Acosta of IMG College.

Those accounts are used to promote ticket giveaways that fly contest winners into or out of the Burbank airport and require participants to like the airport’s Facebook page.

That has pushed the airport’s Facebook page above 10,000 likes, said Rachael Warecki, an airport spokeswoman, and has led to new partnerships, such as one in which Alaska Airlines will provide the tickets to an Oregon State game for this season’s first giveaway.

However, it’s not clear how the efforts have impacted the airport in terms of additional passengers.

In 2013, Dukakis cited market research that found of the 1.3 million UCLA fans who flew in the prior 12 months, around 19% or 254,000 used the Burbank airfield. He said the goal of the partnership would be to encourage the other 80% to use Bob Hope Airport.

This week, he reported that between February 2013 to January 2014, around 143,500 UCLA fans flew out of Burbank, with the contract signed in May 2013. During the same period a year later, roughly 246,500 fans used Bob Hope Airport. IMG College did not provide the data about the total number of UCLA fans who flew during those periods.

Zareh Sinanyan, an airport authority board member from Glendale, asked if that meant the airport had seen an increase of 100,000 passengers in that time. He also asked if that translates into a revenue hike, adding that “at the end of the day it’s all about money.”

According to statistics released earlier this year, the airport saw an increase of roughly 16,000 passengers in 2014. For the first seven months of this year, the passenger count is up more than 50,000, or 2.4%, compared to the first seven months last year.

Airport Executive Director Dan Feger said the airport’s annualized growth is about 2%, or roughly 80,000 passengers. However, he said it would be “extremely difficult” to determine how much of that growth is a result of marketing efforts versus changes in fares, airline schedules or other factors.

“But we believe that every act that we can do to put the airport out there helps [retain customers] and hopefully bring some new ones in, as well,” he added.