Air travel can be overwhelming for business travelers these days, even experienced fliers have to deal with the various hurdles of modern air travel. Luckily, one local company is executing on a previous vision with an aim to eliminate the complications associated with close travel and instead place their values in an area most airlines don’t… your time.
On May 20th, SeaPort Airlines took to the sky for its maiden voyage to Seattle from Portland, connecting the Pacific Northwest’s two largest cities in a way that many local and frustrated commuters could only dream about. What alternatives does SeaPort plan to offer travelers opposite the rigorous but inevitable methods of mainstream airlines?
To learn more about SeaPort, we sat down and spoke with CEO Kent Craford to uncover more about SeaPort’s launch and vision for the future.
“I’m a fifth generation Portlander,” says Craford. “I was commuting a lot between Portland/Vancouver and Seattle for clients. It was a terrible grind as there’s no good way to travel between the two. Vancouver and Seattle are only about 130 miles apart yet often feel like they’re in different states. The congestion was awful, and I remember thinking there had to be an easier way.”
SeaPort, originally launched in 2008, suffered in its original iteration due to shifts in business strategies that prioritized chasing federally subsidized “Essential Air Service” contracts to serve rural areas, abandoning its early goals to simply serve commuters between Portland and Seattle. Ultimately, the original SeaPort filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy by 2016 and ceased operations.
Craford, who co-founded the original SeaPort in 2008, ultimately left after a year due to disputes with the primary investor. Luckily, determined to execute on the promise of the original SeaPort of connecting travelers between Portland and Seattle, Craford revisited the idea with a decade’s worth of experience of running Alaska Seaplanes, a successful regional airline based in Juneau he and his partners acquired in 2011.
Today, SeaPort is committed to the vision Craford had back in the early 2000s, executing a method of travel that’s twice as fast as driving down I-5, avoiding the bottleneck of TSA, catering to last minute check-ins, and simplifying parking before you take to the sky.
“It was about identifying a problem you experience first hand and creating a solution,” says Craford. “I believe that’s what we’ve done.”
One of the solutions Craford and his team at SeaPort came up with to expedite the travel process was to take their commuter shuttle service outside of both the busy PDX and Sea-Tac airports and instead place them at Boeing Field in Seattle and just off Airport way in Portland at PDX Business Aviation.
Equally, during peak travel windows, SeaPort is committed to schedule flights every 45 minutes, with up to 24 flights total between Portland and Seattle.
“On our first day, we actually had one traveler eager to surprise his wife and buy tickets for the first official flight,” said Craford. “He and his wife were the first passengers on a 5:30 am flight and, when they landed at Boeing field in Seattle, some fire trucks met them there and gave them a water cannon salute.”
Craford says that SeaPort’s services cut the time in half as it pertains to traveling between Portland in Seattle.
“Anybody who does this will never go back,” says Craford. “With SeaPort you can be in Seattle for lunch and take a couple of meetings but also be back home in Portland or Vancouver in time for dinner with your family. All we’ve really done is right-size the transportation infrastructure with the distance. It’s about giving people their time back.”
Currently, flights are estimated to be around $279 one-way with each plane capable of holding up to nine passengers. However, prices may vary based on timing and availability. “It’s effectively a magic carpet conveyor belt in the sky,” says Craford before touching on some of the business gaps SeaPort will help close. “One of the major goals of this was to make commerce between Clark County and Puget Sound convenient, frequent, reliable, stable, and healthy again.”
Lastly, Craford touched on the effects of business travel post-Covid and how SeaPort aims to course correct. “We not only want to provide relief for the weary travelers of today but also bring back those travelers who had given up,” says Craford. “So many people want to shake off those habits made by the pandemic but find it extremely daunting to do so. SeaPort provides that opportunity for people to reconnect.”
To learn more or to book a flight of your own, visit www.flyseaportair.com
