If you are one of the thousands of travelers passing through Tampa International Airport this holiday season, you will experience what is generally regarded as one of the finest airports in the country — ranked the best in a 2008 Zagat survey of business travelers, and second only to Portland, Oregon in the same poll in 2009.

But there's one hitch: If you want to fly directly from Tampa to a spot outside the United States, you're out of luck — unless you're headed to Canada, London or the Cayman Islands. Those are the only three international destinations served by direct flights from Tampa’s airport. To get anywhere else beyond U.S. borders, you can’t do so from Tampa without changing planes somewhere along your route.

The lack of direct international flights from TIA has been an ongoing issue for years, but frustrations welled up earlier this month in a raw exchange at a meeting of the Hillsborough County Aviation Authority.

According to press reports, the contentious discussion arose when Authority member Steve Burton made a motion to create a committee on airport international marketing, to be chaired by himself. Burton claimed that previous attempts to get information on the subject had been “stiff-armed” by TIA Executive Director Louis Miller, a charge Miller denied. Mayor Pam Iorio called Burton’s request “disrespectful,” but he was able to get two other members of the group, including Hillsborough County Commissioner Ken Hagan, to support him over the dissenting votes of Iorio and Al Austin. Burton, a managing partner of the Broad & Cassel law firm in Tampa, was named to the Authority in July by Governor Charlie Crist.

Earlier this year, the Tampa Bay Partnership released a study that showed 394 internationally based companies doing business in the Tampa Bay area. Burton says that’s a ripe market hungry for more direct service overseas.

“There’s no direct flight for these folks,” he told CL hours after the combative exchange at the Authority meeting. He says he wants a new committee to be “combined with an overall marketing initiative with Latin America that I want my aviation authority to be a part of… and I think that’s what the statute requires us to do.”

The clamor for more direct international flights out of TIA is nothing new. In 2007, West Tampa businessman and activist Jason Busto complained loud enough to Miller about the paucity of such direct flights that the executive director invited him to be the only at-large member of a new committee to look at opportunities to create more international traffic.

But Busto now complains that there’s not “any sense of urgency” with the committee. “At the end of the day,” he says, “we haven’t increased out nonstop international flights in any way.”

Miller has steadfastly insisted over the years that it’s a lack of demand for such flights that explains the void, and says there simply isn’t a sufficient amount of passengers to justify bringing in carriers who can satisfy that niche.

Chris Steinocher with the Tampa Bay Partnership backs up Miller. He says that his group worked directly with the German air carrier Lufthansa a few years ago to get them to fly directly in and out of Tampa. But, he says, “We couldn’t guarantee the number of seats that these folks were looking for.” Steinocher added that “these airlines are looking for seats in the front of the plane,” meaning business travelers, and that the Partnership couldn’t convince Lufthansa that demand would be there.

(It should be noted that the Partnership received funding from TIA. In the group’s 2007 annual report, the airport was ranked as an investor at the “Market Maker” level, which is listed as providing $10,000 or more.)

Tampa City Councilwoman Mary Mulhern says she’s been in a lot of airports in her life, going back to her previous career when she worked for the Chicago Art Institute. She says TIA is her favorite, and believes Tampa could get more than its share of direct international flights because of its proximity to both Disney and the Pinellas County beaches.

When asked about the claim that there simply isn’t the demand for such traffic, she questions how that can be discerned. “If you don’t have the flights available, people can’t take the flights,” she says. “There’s no way you can figure out how many people are getting in their cars driving to Orlando to get on international flights.”

Actually, there is.

Miller has commissioned two different studies on the issue. A Sabre Airline Solution study reported in 2006 that the airport retains over 83 percent of domestic bookings in the 11 surrounding counties of the airport, but only 66.5 percent of the international bookings.

And a study by Seabury APG done in April of this year said that TIA has “minimal” international capacity compared to airports in Miami, Orlando and Fort Lauderdale. The study said that there was potential for nonstop service to San Jose, Costa Rica and Frankfurt. But Miller said that Trudy Carson, director of air service development for the airport, had met with carriers that go to those markets, and they felt there wasn’t enough natural traffic to work with.

And as far as losing international business to Orlando and Miami? Miller says that there are obvious reasons for that: the Disney empire continues to massively market in Orlando, making it one of the top tourist attractions in the country, while Miami is considered a gateway to Latin America and is also a hub of American Airlines.

Julie Jenkins says she sees both sides of the issue. A Tampa-based travel consultant who has worked extensively in the airline industry, Jenkins says she respects and believes Miller when he says there isn’t a substantial demand for international fights. But, she adds, any relevant information that a new committee might bring to the table should be welcomed; she doesn’t see anything controversial in procuring more information.

Tampa City Councilwoman Linda Saul-Sena met with Miller recently to discuss the issue, and she believes he sees himself as having a different mandate than what the critics are calling for.

“It depends on your perspective,” she says. Miller sees his responsibility as the financial health of the airport, she says, while “others, including me, see the aviation authority has another potential role, as a developer of international trade and economic development.”

Jason Busto says it’s a canard to compare Tampa’s international traffic just to Orlando and South Florida. He mentions the significant Mexican population now in both Hillsborough and Pinellas Counties, and says he’s unhappy that New Orleans was able to craft a package of incentives to get AeroMexican to fly direct out of Louis Armstrong International Airport this past summer.

When discussing the uproar over his request for a new committee to study international travel, Aviation Authority member Steve Burton says of Miller, “The more he pushes back on some basic things, the more I wonder what’s going on out there. Why is openness so difficult? Why is it so difficult to understand what our operation is doing from a marketing operations standpoint?”

BUT MILLER INSISTS he’s not resisting anything. Sitting in his office with Carson at the airport last week, the executive director at TIA asks, what does “more” mean when people say he’s not doing enough?

“I wish they would define that for me. What does ‘more’ mean? More demand. The only way you get more demand is it’s gotta grow in a way that stimulates more people to travel.”

Some critics say that

Miller (photo at right) doesn’t understand the fundamentals of marketing, and they say it takes more than just making a pro forma presentation to an airline to persuade a carrier to do business. They say there are great opportunities being missed right now.

One critic who wishes to remain anonymous said, “He uses his influence not to make this an important issue,” adding, “he’s an accountant, and he doesn’t understand marketing.”

(Trudy Carson is the only staff member of the Aviation Authority dedicated to marketing; in Orlando, the authority employs a five-person marketing staff.)

Hillsborough County Commissioner Kevin Beckner read about the “contentious” Aviation Authority meeting, and even though he didn’t agree on how the new committee was introduced, he believes “having a new set of eyes is very important.” He says, “It’s about thinking outside of the box, because sometimes when people have been in a position for a long time, it’s hard to see new, innovative things. I certainly support looking and studying it to see if it makes economic sense.”

One area in which Tampa International has not done too much is in the provision of financial incentives for airlines to contemplate adding new service. Louis Miller said that the airport did provide a reduction in landing fees for JetBlue plus a $20,000 ad campaign when the airline agreed last year to provide nonstop service to Cancun. Unfortunately, the service was halted this year when anxiety about the H1N1 virus sharply reduced flights to Mexico.

In many communities, local governments have provided tax breaks or other forms of public subsidies to attract or retain carriers. Not much of that has happened with TIA. However, Tampa City Councilwoman Saul-Sena says that’s something local and state governments need to contemplate moving forward.

But incentives can be risky. Earlier this year, the state worked with the city of Tallahassee and Leon County to spend over $1 million to convince Delta to fly nonstop into three Sunshine State cities. But Delta announced a few months ago that they were canceling two of those flights, to Orlando and Tampa, which the St. Petersburg Times later reported would cost the government “hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

Chris Steinocher from the Tampa Bay Partnership says incentives are no sure guarantee of success. He says they can be “most effective when they’re phased out by demand,” something that clearly did not happen with Delta this year.

The question about whether to push for more incentives and other marketing techniques promises to get a full hearing as Steve Burton’s committee begins its work early in 2010. Whether their work will ultimately provide validation for Louis Miller’s theories or for those of his critics, a lot more people in this town are going to be paying attention.