Airport launches new campaign to persuade travelers to choose Milwaukee Mitchell over Chicago O'Hare

A new animated ad campaign is seeking to persuade local travelers who use Chicago airports to choose Milwaukee Mitchell International Airport instead. 

Citing an economic impact study, the airport said in a statement that if "Milwaukeeans choose MKE over a Chicago airport, we could add new flights, hundreds of new jobs and more than $200 million annually to Wisconsin’s economy."

MKE is the International Air Transport Association identification code for Mitchell. 

“More flights, more jobs and more money into our community will happen when we all choose to begin every flight from MKE,” Brian Dranzik, airport director at Mitchell, said in the statement. “Connect to the world by air from MKE, not by car to ORD.

"Bypassing our hometown airport costs us all a lot more than we realize.”

ORD is the identification code for Chicago's O'Hare International Airport. 

The multimedia campaign will run in a variety of locations throughout the remainder of the year.

Mitchell has long used its relative convenience, fares, parking fees and lack of congestion as selling points over O'Hare. 

O'Hare is about 80 miles south of Milwaukee. Among U.S. airports, O'Hare was the world’s sixth-busiest in 2018 with 83.3 million passengers. 

Mitchell handled about 7.1 million passengers in 2018. 

Chicago serves a metro area of 9.5 million people. That means airlines can provide more nonstop flights to more destinations simply based on demand.

The Milwaukee metro area population is about 1.6 million.

Airlines will assign flights to airports where the demand is greatest, and as more people choose Milwaukee, more flights will be the result, said Milwaukee County Executive Chris Abele. 

“As we ramp up our efforts to build an even better-connected travel hub, remember that airlines add flights where travelers board flights," Abele said in a statement. "When you pick MKE as your travel hub, you help us add new gates, expand amenities and improve service for travelers from curb to gate.” 

Mitchell is owned and operated by Milwaukee County. 

Contact Joe Taschler at (414) 224-2554 or jtaschler@gannett.com. Follow him on Twitter at @JoeTaschler or Facebook at facebook.com/joe.taschler.1.