Fort Wayne International Airport

FWA: five Things We Love About Fort Wayne Int’l Airport

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5 Things We Love About Fort Wayne International Airport (FWA)

We’re again with another episode in our “five Things We Love About…” series highlighting capabilities and amenities at airports approximately the usa and the arena.

Today we land at Fort Wayne International Airport (FWA) in Indiana.

1. Free cookies at FWA

Without a doubt, Fort Wayne International Airport has one of the first-rate airport amenities we’ve encountered: loose cookies for all arriving passengers.

On our first go to to FWA, a seatmate told us that we’d get a cookie on arrival. We concept they have been creating a comic story. But it became out they had been now not kidding at all.

The cookies are baked at Ellison Bakery, just across the road from the airport. And FWA has been handing out these delightful welcome snacks for greater than 20 years.

The cookies are without a doubt successful: in June 2020 the airport exceeded out its “three Millionth Cookie” and debuted a brand new style of cookie. Now, as opposed to one cookie, each arriving passenger at Fort Wayne International Airport is welcomed with a bundle that’s packed with numerous miniature cookies. The flavors encompass Birthday Cake and Chocolate Chip and numerous other varieties are turned around in.

2. Local manufacturers at FWA

FWA puts an emphasis on neighborhood brands in the airport. Chapman’s Brewing Company out of Angola, Indiana serves a hint of Northeast Indiana with locally brewed beer on tap. And Conjure Coffee brings a sampling of Fort Wayne’s nearby espresso scene to FWA.

three. Customer carrier at FWA

We informed you approximately the cookies that the Hospitality Hosts hand out to passengers at FWA. In any airport, that might check the box for customer support.

But FWA doesn’t prevent there. The airport’s Customer Service Agents (CSAs) also provide complimentary curbside luggage service, wheelchair help, a parking zone go back and forth, and different services.

4. Hospitality PAWS

Hospitality PAWS is FWA’s certified therapy dog software.

All the pups are especially educated and licensed via the Alliance of Therapy Dogs and show up with their trainers at pick out times for the duration of the week.

5. More to return at FWA

Project Gateway is FWA’s enlargement and improvement challenge. On the agenda: the Parking Lot Rehabilitation Project, East and West Terminal Apron Improvement Project, and the FWA West Terminal Building Expansion. That last piece will upload additional gates, a brand new Mother’s Room, an upgraded Children’s Play Area, and improved ticketing region, a modernized outside façade, and more.   

Did we pass over your favored feature of Fort Wayne International Airport? Let us know within the feedback segment below. And sense unfastened to appoint the following airport to be featured inside the “five Things We Love About…” collection.

Souvenir Sunday: Free Cookies at Fort Wayne Int’l Airport (FWA)

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Since 2000, volunteer hosts at Fort Wayne International Airport in Indiana has been welcoming arriving passengers with free personally wrapped cookies.

The cookies are made fresh by using the close by Ellison Bakery. And while the volunteers are off-duty, cookies are nevertheless to be had from a self-serve cookie kiosk at the security exit.

Over the years, FWA Airport has given out numerous the ones unfastened cookies.

Millions, in fact.

And on Friday, June 26 the airport had a celebration for the 3-millionth unfastened cookie.

The visitors of honor? An unsuspecting own family arriving on a flight from Tampa. In addition to the loose milestone cookie, their prizes encompass a basket of items from the airport, a free roundtrip price ticket for two on Allegiant Air, and lots more cookies from Ellison Bakery. Nice!

Despite a drop in air site visitors this is no doubt taking a bite out of its price range, the free cookie program at Fort Wayne International Airport is not crumbling.

In fact, FWA and Ellison Bakery announced that arriving passengers will now get a free package of seven small diverse cookies in place of simply one.

Read greater approximately the welcome cookie application at Fort Wayne International Airport in my story at the Runway Girl Network.

Airport amenity of the week: free cookie kiosk

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The first time I flew into Fort Wayne International Airport I thought my fellow passengers were kidding me after they stated: “Make sure you get a loose cookie while you get off the aircraft.”

 

But they weren’t joking: as I entered the terminal there has been indeed someone standing there greeting all and sundry getting off the aircraft and handing out loose cookies from a little wicker basket.

Turns out they’ve been doing this for extra than 10 years. And, to date, volunteers at the airport have exceeded out extra than a million complimentary, domestically-baked cookies.

Those volunteers want some off. So maximum days there’s been nobody on obligation handing out cookies after eight:30 pm.

Until now.

Airport officers were getting complaints from cookie-loving passengers who arrived on the airport too overdue to get a snack. So to make sure nobody leaves the airport hungry and disenchanted, the airport now has a self-serve cookie kiosk.

Are airports ready for the brand new three-hour rule? Are you?

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(picture courtesy Daniel Incandela)

My column on USATODAY.com this month, Are airports prepared for the three-hour rule?, takes a have a look at how airports are gearing up for the April 29th roll-out of the new Department of Transportation (DOT) rule to upgrade protections for airline passengers.

We’ve been listening to loads from airways – they’re not happy – but I was curious approximately what the autumn-out is probably for airports if (whilst?) greater planes become turning round and coming lower back to the terminal and if (while?) more humans turn out to be stuck on the airport.

I was imagining I’d listen fear, maybe even hysteria, from airport officers.  That’s not what I got. In fact, the responses I got down the road were greater along the strains of “We’re ready. Bring it on.”

You can study the whole column – and the very intriguing remarks readers were posting – on USATODAY.com.  Here’s a number of what airport officials advised me:

Airports at the prepared

Long earlier than the DOT announced more suitable protections for airline passengers, airports were keeping meetings to paintings on growing device kits and first-class practices that would be used at some point of excessive flight delays. At Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport, for instance, govt vice president for operations Jim Crites says that in 2007 the airport began buying greater device to assist deplane passengers speedy. DFW additionally started out beefing up communications with airlines, with regional airports that could get diverted flights and with airport concessionaires that might need to stay open later than common for the duration of abnormal operations. “The customer expects each person to be on the same page. So instead of doing enterprise in isolation, you started out to see greater coordination, greater teaming up and partnering across entities.”

It’s the same story at many small and medium-sized airports. “After that incident whilst humans had been stuck on a JetBlue plane in New York for 9 hours we agreed as a control crew that we might no longer let that show up right here,” says Russell Widmar, the aviation director at California’s Fresno Yosemite International Airport, “So we’ve had our very own passengers’ bill of rights in place for nearly a 12 months and a half of now.”

The plan that the crew worked out was correctly placed to the take a look at in January 2008, whilst severe weather on the California coast added 14 diverted planes to Fresno Airport. “It truely isn’t any problem handling greater flights,” says Widmar, “The handiest issue is that these passengers don’t need to be in Fresno. They need to be San Francisco or anyplace they have been headed. But in the event that they become here, irrespective of when they drop in, we've got offerings available for them. No one desires to be caught at the aircraft.”

Widmar believes that via now pretty an awful lot each airport is prepared to cope with this type of pastime. That consists of the numerous small airports no longer currently blanketed by means of the DOT contingency plan rule, consisting of Indiana’s Fort Wayne International Airport, which frequently get diverted flights from Chicago and Detroit. FWA govt director Tory Richardson says “The DOT rule is silent on how the coordination plans are to be dealt with at small airports, despite the fact that there are some hundred of us. But we can step up … Nobody needs the black eye that took place in Rochester.”

More a laugh freebies at airports

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Free is good. And nowadays many small and mid-size airports are trying to construct loyalty by using offering travelers unfastened services.

In my At the Airport column this month on USAToday.com, I write (once more) about the free cookies they hand out at Indiana’s Fort Wayne International Airport in addition to a number of the fun freebies provided at other airports.

Florida’s  Jacksonville International Airport distributes unfastened plant life to passengers each year on Valentine’s Day and on Mother’s Day.

The Reno-Tahoe International Airport offers free neighborhood smartphone calls yr-round.

In Milwaukee, home of Harley-Davidson Motor Company and the Harley-Davidson Museum, the General Mitchell International Airport offers loose parking for any tourist who arrives on a bike.

At Ohio’s Port Columbus International Airport, youngsters are given loose crayons and clean put up-paid postcards and requested to please mail back a photo from their travels for show in an airport gallery. The airport has additionally bought its personal popcorn machine and arms out loose bags of popcorn during quarterly purchaser appreciation days. “It’s a wonderful way for us to say thanks,” says CMH communications manager Angie Tabor, “Plus, who doesn’t love the smell of popcorn?”

And in Wisconsin, the Outagamie County Regional Airport gives out loose toothbrushes.

Airport advertising manager Kim Sippola says: “We noticed that many commercial enterprise vacationers would get off the plane, move into the bathroom, and seek thru their luggage for a toothbrush because they were going proper from the airport to a meeting. So we notion we’d reduce some strain for our customers by means of offering them with toothbrushes.”

The airport partnered with a local dentist and now stocks post-security toilets with travel-sized oral hygiene kits that include mouthwash, dental floss and a toothbrush with a unmarried-serving of toothpaste.

Have you observed a extraordinary airport freebie? Please allow us to recognise so we can inform different travelers approximately it.