Houston Airport System Update

Transcript

Mario DiazWe are finally on the upswing again. We, Houston, really this city is driven in large part by energy and, of course, with the stall in the energy sector, we've had a bit of a difficult time with maintaining the premium seats we were very famous for, filling those premium seats. Because you had the oil exploration companies traveling all over the world, anytime, anywhere that there is a scent of oil, Houston companies were there in droves. So that tapered off traffic, we were pretty flat, there were other parts of the economy that took over and kept the traffic at, at least, an even level, but 2018, the first quarter we're starting to see it pick up again in traffic.

As a matter of fact, we're very, very delighted. When you think back to 2012 one of the big issues in Houston was that you could take a flight from Chicago to Caracas, Venezuela, and pay $700. But if you were going from Houston to Caracas, Venezuela, it was $1200. The opening of Hobby as a second regional international airport of the Americas has really opened up the Latin America, because Hobby is a regional international airport of the Americas. It has brought down prices, it has increased travel, it increased the number of seats, and so we're really just delighted about it.

First of all, all travel is driven by the economy, GDP. Growth and GDP will have a positive impact on growth in airline traffic. To the extent that the United States gets in to a tariff war that leads to a collapse, or certainly a slowdown of the world GDP and the world economy, it's going to have an effect. There's no question about it.

We are working with Customs and Border Protection, we have facial recognition already deployed in our federal inspection services building and we are now also distributing them to the security checkpoints. We have found, for example, that with the use of facial recognition technology not to grab or store information about passengers, but simply to use it to be able to track times that people actually move through the process. We have been able to improve our efficiency of moving people through so that today about 85% our passengers arriving international make it through the process in less than 30 minutes. Now we're also applying that technology to the security checkpoints. When the federal government, and I think it'll be soon, when the federal government is ready to trigger full blown facial recognition as the means to allow boarding of passengers, we'll be there.

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