Airlines see potential in travel by immigrants

Airlines operating in the USA are awakening to the huge potential of immigrant families like the Polios, who run a successful cleaning business in Herndon, Va. Immigrant travelers who regularly return to their native country to celebrate, mourn, volunteer, look for spouses or conduct business offer a huge and fast-growing source of airline revenue.

U.S. airlines once took immigrant travel largely for granted, seeing it as a modest revenue generator but not one that required special attention. But that's changing as immigrants' numbers swell, their standard of living improves and modern communication tightens the bonds to friends and family left behind.

"There is a whole category of passenger demand that's booming ..., and it's testing airlines' traditional assumptions and strategies," says market tracker Craig Jenks of Airline/Aircraft Projects.

Immigrant travelers represent a market distinct from the business-travel and vacation markets. Like the Polio family, many Latinos, Caribbean islanders and Indians routinely travel with scores of gifts for extended family to meet cultural obligations. As a result, they often exceed luggage limits, forcing airlines to adjust their cargo assumptions.

They tend to favor airlines with native-speaking cabin crews and familiar cuisine, movies and music. They often buy tickets at ethnic travel agencies or airport ticket counters, preferring to pay with cash, debit cards or on layaway — practices not permitted with a Web purchase.

The potential of the ethnic market for struggling U.S. airlines is huge, Jenks says. A recent analysis by the non-profit Center for Immigration Studies shows that the USA's immigrant population hit a record 35.2 million in March, more than double the number at the height of the last big immigration wave of 1910. Immigrants now make up 12% of the U.S. population.

Emotional ties mean that little deters their trips to their home country — not terrorism concerns or higher fares, consultant Jenks says. "Grandmother expects you back," he says.

Changing service

Yet, the market remains difficult to quantify. Airlines don't ask passengers to describe their ethnic background or their reason for flying, so they can't officially track a route's mix by ethnicity.

But it's clear that routes on many airlines serving the USA are flourishing because of immigrant demand. Mexicana Airlines, for example, started daily flights this month from Portland, Ore., to Guadalajara, because of high demand from Mexicans working in Oregon.

Cathay Pacific, the Hong Kong-based carrier that flies from three U.S. cities, credits growing demand from Chinese, Filipinos, Indians and Vietnamese living in the USA with its 28% revenue growth this year. And Houston airports director Rick Vacar says Houston's growing Pakistani immigrant community was behind Pakistan International Airlines' decision to launch service more than a year ago.

"It's truly amazing how (service has) changed," Vacar says.

Richard Pasciuto, an Air France executive, says ethnic travelers are fueling Air France's explosive growth on routes between the USA and Warsaw and Mumbai.

Global trend-spotter Trendwatching.com calls the recent phenomenon of flying back and forth between native and adopted countries "home trotting."

The idea is that e-mail, cheap telephone service, satellite television and sending money home from America foster deeper long-distance relationships today than in the past. And global expansion of air service makes it feasible to periodically cultivate those relationships in person.

Louis DeSipio, social sciences professor at University of California, Irvine, says that a hundred years ago, Italian and Polish immigrants wrote home and six weeks later got a letter back. "But now it can be a daily kind of communication. If you're part of people's daily lives, it's less of a stretch to attend Auntie's birthday or somebody's retirement."

In terms of fares, immigrant travel tends to fit in between the high-fare world of business travel and the rock-bottom prices demanded by vacationers. But even coach-class fliers still pay more than $1,000 round trip per person to fly to remote countries such as Vietnam, Nigeria and Lebanon. Flights to many of these countries cost more per mile than, say, flights to Europe, Jenks says.

First-generation Filipino-Americans snapped up $1,900 round-trip tickets for Christmas travel this month on Northwest, Korean Air and Cathay Pacific, up from about $1,200 a year ago, says Vid Figueras, whose Jersey City company, Garden State, sells tickets to ethnic Filipino agencies in the Northeast.

"The airlines are taking advantage of it," he says.

Travel agencies key

The gateway to the immigrant travel market are the travel agencies that dot ethnic neighborhoods in Chicago, New York, San Francisco and elsewhere.

American Airlines for years has cultivated relationships with ethnic agencies throughout the New York boroughs who handle business for Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Brazilians and other Latino and Caribbean groups. The New York-area sales office has hired several native speakers to nurture their business, says John Lisiewski, American's sales manager in New York for the Atlantic, Caribbean and Latin America.

In Westminster, a Los Angeles suburb that's home to the largest Vietnamese-American community in the USA, the Little Saigon Ticket Center is seeing ticket sales for Vietnam grow by about 10% annually, manager Cung Pham says. Nearly all of his clients are Vietnamese-Americans.

Business has been so solid at New York-based Delgado Travel, that the agency expanded even after 9/11, when mainstream agencies were folding. The Delgado family runs 36 agencies in New York, New Jersey and Illinois, six of which opened in the past three years, says Linda Delgado, vice president of the agency. Her father, Hector, started the business in 1973 by selling tickets to fellow Ecuadorians at Queens soccer matches.

Some of the chain's sales success reflects the huge growth of newcomers from South and Central America. But it also reflects a marketing strategy that speaks to Latinos' sense of community, values and needs, Delgado says.

At the Delgado agency in Jackson Heights, Queens, customers find vivid red walls, lush plants and big-screen TVs that alternate between Spanish music videos, soccer matches and soap operas in Spanish. Neon signs advertise services for wiring money home to family.

A lot of newly migrated don't know how to read or write. They want to feel comfortable," Delgado says. "They don't trust the Internet. Sometimes they ask agents 15 questions."

U.S. airlines step up to plate

Traditionally, foreign airlines have held an advantage over U.S. airlines in bidding for the ethnic market in the USA. They fly places that U.S. carriers don't operate. They share a common cuisine, language and culture with their potential customer.

Now, U.S. airlines are stepping up the competition as they attempt to expand globally. United, American and Continental, for instance, in the past year have launched routes from the USA to Vietnam, China and India. What initially attracted U.S. airlines to these routes was a burgeoning economy and high demand from U.S. corporations, but they rely on immigrant travelers to fill their coach cabins.

Fueling the explosion in ethnic travel are people such as Vietnam native Thang Hoang, who, at 29, has been rediscovering the country of his birth.

As a young adult, the entrepreneur from Fountain Valley, Calif., had flown to Vietnam every two years to visit cousins in Ho Chi Minh City. Now, he makes frequent business trips and sets aside time to explore.

"I feel bad for not knowing some parts of the country," says Hoang, who left Vietnam at 12.

Vietnam opened the country to foreign travel about 20 years ago and now openly embraces the return of the "Viet kieu," or overseas Vietnamese. Of the 1.2 million Vietnamese living in the USA, about 250,000 fly to Vietnam each year. Seeing the opportunity, United launched service to Ho Chi Minh City a year ago, becoming the first U.S. carrier to launch service to Vietnam, and the first U.S. carrier to land there in three decades.

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