Denver International Airport officials have prepared a travel budget for 2011 that is 39 percent higher than the amount budgeted for employee travel this year.
On Sunday, The Denver Post reported that actual spending on travel by DIA employees this year will be about 43 percent higher than 2009’s level.
The amount spent is typically less — at times considerably less — than the budgeted amount, according to a review of five years of travel by airport employees.
DIA has budgeted $741,593 for travel next year, and of that total, $651,781 has been preapproved, according to airport documents. It is the highest budgeted amount for travel in the past five years.
In 2010, DIA budgeted $533,590 for travel, but for the year through Dec. 10, actual travel spending totaled $383,094.
Sally Covington, DIA’s deputy manager for marketing and communications, said travel by a broad range of DIA employees is important if the airport is to maintain its position as the fifth-busiest in the country in terms of passenger volume.
“It’s about keeping us in front of the market,” she said of the travel expenditures.
Her department has 37 trips, involving eight employees, planned for 2011, with a projected expense of $138,600.
Marketing, among all DIA departments, has the highest travel budget for 2011. As one example, Covington and DIA air service director Laura Jackson will travel to Seoul, South Korea, and Tokyo in the spring, at an estimated cost of $12,000, to “continue dialogue regarding nonstop service to Asia,” according to the 2011 travel roster.
DIA has been courting All Nippon Airways for years in the hope that the Japanese carrier will start nonstop Toyko-Denver service.
Travel aimed at securing more air service for DIA is an important investment for the airport and the region, said Covington, who noted that DIA employees took a number of trips to Southwest Airlines’ Dallas headquarters as part of the process of getting Southwest to re-enter the Denver market in 2006.
In all, DIA’s preapproved travel budget for 2011 includes more than 300 trips for airport employees, according to the documents. DIA has a total of about 900 employees.
“There are a lot of controls on travel,” Covington said, adding that requests for trips “are looked at by a lot of people.”
Separately, Covington said the airport is asking Denver’s Board of Ethics for an “advisory opinion” on the propriety of DIA manager Kim Day’s allowing an aviation-conference sponsor to pay Day’s travel expenses to an airports meeting in Athens, Greece, last year.
The Athens conference occurred around the time DIA was contracting with the meeting sponsor, Insight Media, to bring a similar Airport Cities Conference to Denver in 2012. DIA is paying Insight $370,000 for that event.
In The Post’s Sunday story, Day said she checked with ethics-board director Michael Henry before taking the trip to make sure there was no conflict of interest.
