Vision Airlines owes roughly $260,000 in unpaid passenger facility charges to Northwest Florida Regional Airport, and the amount is growing every day.
A $4.50 passenger facility charge is collected by each airline for every paying passenger who departs from Northwest Florida Regional. The airlines keep 11 cents from each charge for collecting the fee, but are supposed to pay the remaining $4.39 to the airport within 30 days after the end of the month in which it is collected.
Vision Airlines started offering flights out of Northwest Florida Regional in December 2010, but did not make its first passenger facility charge payment until about two weeks ago, when it sent in $55,000.
“We have been working with them on getting them current again on the passenger facility charge collections,” said Jon Morris, finance manager for the airport.
Vision is the only airline that is behind on its payments.
Clay Meek, director of sales for Vision, said the airline has been late because the credit card processor it has contracted with, First Data, is withholding millions of dollars in revenues from the airline.
“We’re working on getting them to release those fees, but we’re planning to pay off the airport regardless of the outcome with the processor,” Meek said. “We’re in the middle of getting those funds released. And this is not hundreds of thousands of dollars, this is multiple millions of dollars that they’ve held because the spike in sales happened so quick. Basically, there’s a tremendous amount of that revenue we were never able to see.”
Meek said the issue with the credit card processor is a dilemma all airlines face. In 2008, Frontier Airlines even filed for bankruptcy protection because its credit card processor, which also happened to be First Data, was withholding so much from the airline’s ticket sales.
Northwest Florida Regional is not the only airport Vision owes passenger facility charges.
The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette newspaper reported earlier this month that Little Rock National Airport was in the process of terminating Vision’s permit to operate because the airline owed more than $50,000 in passenger facility charges, a replacement security deposit and other fees.
Northwest Florida Regional will give Vision time to pay up.
“We’ve received a payment and we’re expecting to get a schedule of when the rest of those payments are coming in,” Morris said. “We have not made a big issue of it. Little Rock chose to notify the FAA, and I think there are a few other locations. Vision is a start-up company and they’re engaging in something that is rather new in the airline industry. We’re trying, of course, to help Vision along and they have been very helpful to us as well.”
Vision began service with flights to Niagara Falls and Miami last December. It then expanded to almost two dozen cities before scaling back to five destinations.
Meek said Vision lost between $6 million and $8 million during a four-and-a –half-month period when some of its destinations did not perform as well as expected.
Still, he said the airline was committed to the region and would likely announce an expanded spring and summer schedule in February.
“Certainly with the losses that we took, we don’t want to do it the same way,” Meek said. “We want to learn from it, regroup and do it in such a way that it’s very profitable. We want to do it in such a way that our credit card processor doesn’t hold us hostage and we’re able to cash flow both a profit and easily get everything taken care of that we might owe the airports.
“There are certain things we have control of and certain things we don’t,” Meek added. “Unfortunately, (the overdo passenger facility charges) is a bad turn here, but from a long-term point of view we see Destin as a great destination. Although we wouldn’t do it exactly the same way we did it this past time, we see our continued services there now. We’re impacting the community and we see that continuing in the future.”
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