COU cancellations affecting businesses and organizations
Some local organizations are impacted by the Columbia Regional Airport flight cancellations.
David Parmley, the owner of the Broadway Hotel in downtown Columbia, said he has noticed an impact on the hotel’s bookings because of the runway repairs at the airport.
“I think we’ve maybe had 10 to 12 cancellations, most of those within a 24-hour window, so we refunded them their money since they couldn’t make it down here. I would say it’s been huge,” Parmley said.
Parmley also mentioned how his hotel usually handles these situations.
“We usually refer them to the airlines themselves because they have procedures in place for handling the situations like this,” he said.
The University of Missouri is also affected. A spokesman for the university, Christian Basi, explained how the university uses the airport.
“We have employees all over the university that use this on a regular basis, whether that’s folks going out recruiting, whether that is faculty that are going to meet with colleagues or go to conferences or administrators going out to talk to alumni and friends of the university,” Basi said. “We utilize it as much as we can.”
Basi told ABC 17 News he believes the communication from the city and the airport has been good.
“Things are moving along. We understand this is a tough situation, but we look forward to having everything up and operational again,” Basi said.
The impact of the flight cancellations is not just local. The Louisiana State University baseball team was scheduled to fly into Columbia on Thursday . ABC 17 News spoke with an employee of LSU who deals with travel plans, and she said the university was not notified about the closure until the University of Missouri reached out and told them they may need to change their plans.
The employee of LSU said that they had to quickly rebook their charter flight to fly into the Jefferson City airport.
ABC 17 News also reached out to the airline they use for their flights, Elite Airways, and they said they were notified about the runway closures by the Federal Aviation Administration earlier this week.
