 This is Jay Fidel, and today we're talking about the Middle Way. And on this show, we're going to talk about expert opinions regarding international travel, which is very important now in the prospect of a full-throated reopening. And my co-host is Chang Wan in Minneapolis, and we have Rick King, who is with the MAC, which you'll learn much more about in a minute. Now, Chang, how about introducing Rick and giving us a handle on the scope of our discussion? Thank you, Jay, and welcome, Rick, with our distinguished honor to have you here with us today to talk about international travel from an expert perspective. And it's not easy for me to introduce Rick, but first I want to quote an article I authored years ago when a correspondent asked me about Rick, and I just responded to the following statement. Rick King is a senior business executive with profound intelligence, superb management skills, and tremendous integrity. In short, he's a wise man with a big heart who teaches me modesty, honesty, empathy, compassion, confidence, patience, tolerance, and professionalism. I'm seeing that with my full heart because I had the privilege and the fortune to work for Rick for 12 years. And currently, Rick is the chair of Metropolitan Airport Commission, the MAC, and also he's on the board of Minnesota Public Radio, on the board of Huntington, Banshear, TCF Bank, on the board of Minnesota Technology Council, and in many, many other roles. But most importantly, he is a pilot, is very enthusiastic about flying, and so I think he got his dream job to manage the airports. And I, like me, Rick is also a global traveler, he's traveled many, many countries, but like the rest of us for the past two years, we've been pretty much confining our house. So that's the reason we want to invite Rick, both as a global traveler, but also a chair of the MAC to share with us his observation, reflection, and prediction on the international travel in the coming months. Back to you, Jay. OK, Rick, you get an opportunity to rebut all of that. Well, I have to say, it's a very generous introduction by my fine friend. I don't know what to say, but rebuttal might go longer than your show. Now, thank you. Thank you, Cheng. And thanks for coming, Rick. So let's talk about, you know, COVID. We are in the reopening now and a lot of people. It's hard to say what the demographics are, but I feel that we're in a reopening where they can be confident to travel again, where they don't mind making your reservation, getting on a plane and even sitting next to people and going places. And that's happening. The holidays bear it out every time. Here we have July 4th coming up. I'm sure there'd be plenty of traffic for that. So can you comment on the reopening as far as air travel is concerned and as far as the MAC is concerned? Yes. So let me first say thanks for having me on the MAC, the Metropolitan Airport Commission, is a state agency, quasi agency. It's actually a public corporation that runs the MSP Air International Airport as well as Six Reliever Airport. So it's an airport authority. Members are appointed one each by the mayor of Minneapolis and the mayor of St. Paul and there are 13 members appointed by the governor. So this focus of this group is to manage the airport. And the big airport, of course, is MSP and MSP suffered mightily in that March day when when air traffic pretty much shut off in 2020. We were in for a booming year of a we had a booming year in 2019, we're heading for the same thing in 2020 until COVID hit. Things are looking up right now. What we have seen over the last several months, particularly since the vaccinations have become more profoundly spread across the population, said personal travel, leisure travel has come up mightily. And we're seeing people all around the airport wanting to go to tourist destinations for somewhat limited by that. We'll get into it because they're looking more domestically and things are starting to open in a couple of countries that people go to. But I'll give you an interesting fact. Alaska has seen a tourist boom because, of course, they're in the greater 50 states, as is the state of Hawaii, where you are, and people want to go there because a lot of times they haven't been there. They're looking for someplace to go. It doesn't have as many complications as going somewhere in Europe or even to Hawaii until very recently had a lot of restrictions in terms of quarantine and testing and so forth. And thankfully to try to protect people there. So not being critical about that. But those restrictions certainly hurt what's happening in the tourist industry, not only in Hawaii during the time, but also around the rest of the world. So what we've seen, Jay, is a big, big increase. We now, though, even with that increase in personal travel, are probably about 75 percent of where we were in 2019 relative to passengers. So we're still not back where we were. Many people are predicting that the holidays will continue. We've got July 4th. You've got Labor Day after Labor Day. Businesses are allegedly going to be increasing their travel. We'll see some things come back a little bit. But in the fall, until you get to the holidays, Thanksgiving, Christmas and so forth, you see a bit of a drop off in travel naturally in the seasonal patterns. And then, of course, the first quarter of every year after the holidays is kind of a rough time, usually for travel. So I think we're going to see the tradition be just like it has been, but will be slightly below the peak levels that we bit in. So what is the experience of the traveler going through the airport and getting on the plane? I mean, what restrictions are imposed in your airports? And what and I'm afraid to say, I don't know what restrictions are imposed by the airlines these days. What's the experience like like vis-a-vis the restrictions of COVID? So the the current restrictions in most of the airports in the United States are pretty simply said, the CDC provides an advisory and the TSA as a mask rule in place for all airports and airlines through September 13. Whether they're going to extend that or not, at this point, we really don't know. So if you're in an airport in the U.S., you have to wear a mask. If you're on a plane in the U.S., you have to wear a mask. And it's the TSA's authority that is dictating that. During various parts of COVID, and this would be more in the past, states had mask regulations that were out there for. State locations that included the airport and many airports, including MSP, had their own mask regulations. More and more, those orders have been taken away because we're now relying on the CDC who advises the TSA. My prediction will be that that depending on what happens with these new variants that are out there, I think the TSA might have been poised to move that order, take that away as we get close to September 13. But with the variants picking up, all bets could be off. Yeah, well, there was an article in Times this morning about how this is what Tony Fauci's been saying the last few days is the existing vaccines, even in a cocktail combination of vaccines, are mostly useful against the variants. So we may have a problem. It's not that serious going forward. And the question is whether when and whether this pervades the public conversation so that people can develop an opinion about it. But I'm wondering also, now, you had a period of, well, even from this discussion, nearly a year where you were subject to a public lack of confidence, public concern about flying and being in public spaces in general. And I wonder how that affected the operation of the airports in the MAC. You must have had a shrink staff. You must have had to limit access. What did you do to comport with the changes in that period? Well, you're absolutely right, Jay. And the job of the airport authority is to also sign up all the restaurateurs, all of the newsstands, all of the people that do retail, commerce, the rental car companies. You deal with the parking revenue. So if you think about where all the money that is revenue to the airport authority that it spends on improving the airport come from, it dropped through the floor. And it not only affects the airport itself, but it affects all these vendors. There are approximately 600 employees of the airport authority around the system. There are 20,000 people that make their living working at the airport at one of these entities. So it affects employment. A lot of those groups had to lay off people, furlough people, airlines included food service and so forth. And the Mac very carefully went through its budget, didn't fill any jobs for a long time, did a lot of different techniques that you would use to try to prevent any kind of layoffs. We were able to not do any layoffs, but that was probably because of the tightness of some of the things that we did, but also the fact that the federal government came in was some aid packages. And we were able to meet our bond payments with that. And then we were able to share some of the money that the federal federal government provided us with these entities, their airlines and food service and others so that they would be able to sustain themselves until the day we could come back with them. Yeah, just a side point you've been following, I guess, the infrastructure bill wending its way, hopefully, through Congress, actually bills, I should say, wending their way through Congress. The question, does any of that fall, you know, for you? Will you get anything from the infrastructure bill? You are mainstream infrastructure, for sure. That's true. There is there is money. The money in the infrastructure bills goes to the FAA that then does grants that you do construction off of and you do construction with your own money. You run projects with your own money. You run projects with FAA grant money and you run projects with with fees that are on the airline ticket. Those are called PFCs. So you get money through those mechanisms and we draw money from these vendors, a percent of what their retail take is. And you use that to operate the airport and different parts of it, for example, an inbound roadway might be part of construction that the federal government will pay for. But if you need to get a new gate, that might be something that you have to build on your own and you ultimately charge the airlines in more of a rental scenario once it's up and going in the infrastructure bill. There are some improvements for airports out there. And I do want to say the three rounds of federal aid that came during the pandemic were very helpful to allowing the airport and the people that make their money off the airport to sustain themselves and be here to rebuild as as traffic picks up. What an exciting ride for you. I mean, I guess it started off as a dream job and then it was a complex dream job. That's all but very challenging for sure. So here you are now at 75 percent of the traffic you had in 2019. And I guess my question is what, you know, what is the ramp up like? What are you doing to meet the additional demand, the additional service? And, you know, are people doing the same kinds of travel they were doing before? Or is it different? Well, let me start with part of the question you asked before. And I don't think I quite got to it. The thing that we needed to do during COVID was demonstrate to the traveling public, the limited traveling public that we were a safe place to go. So you want to create every opportunity to be safe, healthy and so forth. And what we created was a program that we called travel confidently. We talked about masks, sanitation, sanitary hand cleaning, all those things that you do as touchless as you could be. You could order food, it could be delivered by a robot, fewer touches. You had lots of markers about space, separation. You did different designs in your your lobby rather than trying to get as many people into the line as you could. You had to get people six feet apart. We gave away masks as much as we could. And airlines and other partners worked at putting up plexiglass partitions and things like that. So much of that right now, including the masks. The touchless activity in terms of either the restrooms or the food ordering will continue. And I think they're actually good improvements from a from a health point of view for everybody as we even come out of COVID. I think what you see is less of the six foot distancing now. But you're, of course, as I said earlier, by the DSA or still wearing masks. Airlines that for a while, a couple of them, including one that is the dominant airline here, Delta Airlines, locked middle seats for a whole period of time. They stopped doing that in May of of this this year. So you're starting to see some of those things come back into a more normal state. But it's not normal when you walk through the airport is seeing everybody wearing a mask. And I think the other thing that's not normal and you read a lot about this is people seem to be on the edge of emotionalism when they're on flights these days. We've seen lots of different examples of people getting a little bit out of control. And, you know, we'd all probably like to say, well, I just had one too many to drink. But the fact is it's not related to that. It just seems like people were cooped up for a long time and they're kind of letting loose in ways that we all wish they wouldn't. I am sad, saddened to say that some flight attendants and flight personnel have been injured in the process. Passengers have been arrested. There's numerous passengers. And this is nationwide, but on no fly lists, things like that. I think it's part of the coming out from being quarantined, I'm afraid. And I don't see a lot of that at MSP, but we're no, you know, we're no island to those kinds of behaviors. Yeah, interesting. So Chang, let's turn to you for a minute and ask you about your aspirations for international travel and your observations as to whether international travel is like it was. We've had geopolitical changes, the diplomatic changes, foreign policy changes that may affect things both in Europe and Asia. So how do you see international travel for yourself and and people with whom you deal? I can only speak as a regular traveler. I'm not an expert of airports or airline, but for the past two years, all the travel I have scheduled for international has been canceled. Or postponed. Now, the biggest problem is not only the difficulty in logistics of travel, but also foreign relations and also a visa. It foreign citizens will have a very difficult time to obtain a visa to enter certain countries and let not mention the mandatory quarantine. So you know, and there are so many manmade rules put in place who intentionally make international travel intimidating and difficult. So the last international travel, the some country will feel more secured. That's quite unfortunate, but we can all understand with a delta variant and with a gamma variant. And if many countries do not have Pfizer vaccine, do not have Moderna vaccine, they're so scared. There was a Wall Street Journal article a few days ago that China will close down its border to all foreigners until the end of 2022. And that could be not only true for China, but for many other countries. And Europe is temporarily open to the Americans. But I thought that this will last long and a recommission to me that he expect some issues in other parts of the country, other parts of the world as well, not only difficulty in traveling to Asia, Asian countries, but also might be other parts of the world. Might be go back to more restricted measures. I guess that off, we are on the we feel like we are on the right pass to reopen to what's going to happen in the next few months. We have no idea. I'm going to just leave these to Rick to share his comments. Yeah, Rick, you know, I'm really interested in your thoughts about this. I imagine Minneapolis, St. Paul is an international hub, especially if it's serviced by Delta. And you're going to have a certain amount of a certain percentage of traffic as international traffic. And so how has COVID affected that? How is it affecting it now? What is the recovery like? And gee whiz that the problems that Chang described sound pretty profound. How are you dealing with that? How is the traveling public dealing with that? Well, the traveling public, let's say, is very anxious to get back to international travel. Unfortunately, it's going to take a while, as Chang mentioned here. I would I would have some advice for people on it. And during that, I can also talk about some of the countries that and what they're doing. But things in international travel change almost every day. So it's a good idea to really, if you're planning something, to check out CDC site, check out the airline site and understand what a given destination has in store for you. A lot of the airlines have interactive maps where you can look at what's what is the requirement to get into a particular destination. So first thing I do is check CDC for your destination, then I look up the entry requirements for your destination. Make sure you've digitally scanned your proof of vaccination, that little limsy cardboard piece of paper you got from the US. I like to put it, scan it right into the notes version in my iPhone so I can have it there pretty well. Some places like Sam's Club and Walgreens actually have something called a health pass by the company called Clear, which also does some of the airport TSA proof of ID entry. If you're if you've got your tests from them, you can use that app. Travel is extremely flexible internationally. So make sure you've got good refundable fares because you never know what's going to go on. And then there's places where you can get an expedited check in places like American, Air Lingus, B.A. Iberia, by the way, B.A. Air Lingus and Iberia are all part of one airline group. And then Japan Air along with American is part of that. One of the airline alliances, they use something called Verify Health Passport, so that's something that those airlines have been together to use that they're trying to make it easier for you to get through the jungle of each of these countries. And then when you come back to the U.S., by the way, U.S. still requires a test before you come back in, even if you've been vaccinated. So a lot you got a plan for your return test when you leave. And there are at home tests that you can actually buy and take with you, which is a lot better than perhaps trying to find it wherever you go. That said, that said, some of the EU nations today are open, Croatia, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain. They'll take U.S. citizens that have been vaccinated in and they have varying requirements about testing and stuff like that. They're not closed. Many, many countries are still closed. Caribbean nations, many of them are open. I could go through the list there. Mexico is open. Canada is not open. So there's a there's a mishmash of things going around. Many people ask about the UK and the EU countries. EU countries just remove the ban on travel to the U.S., but you have to go through or travel from the U.S., rather, but you still have to go through whatever their specific regime is when you get their documentation and quarantine in some cases and still test when you go back. The UK still has the stringent testing and quarantine right now. So that's disappointing for a lot of people. And these were the places everybody wanted to have open, including them for Americans to come and visit. I would say pick your place carefully. Study a lot and figure out where you want to go and be prepared to check right before you leave because things change a lot. Well, you know, it strikes me that there's a lot of a lot of room for error on the part of the individual traveler that he didn't or she didn't read it carefully. Didn't get the right test. Doesn't have the right proof. You know, it can make a list of all the possible footfalls here. And I imagine as the guy who oversees the operations of these airports, you have a certain number of people who come to you or or to your middle middle management on a given day reporting that Joe Dokes is stuck. He can't get on his flight. He's sitting there in the airport and he doesn't know what to do. What do we do for him? Is this true? And what what do you do for him? Well, that does that does happen. It's in a sense, it's very similar to people who actually go to a foreign country without the proper paperwork, whether it's a passport or a visa for that country. And basically, they're not allowed in the country. So they're in this, I'll call it no man's land. They left where they left. They arrived where they arrived, but they're not admitted in. They usually get sent back. Oh, they sit and there's expense rate. Now, the airlines are required to send them back. And the reason for that is on the visa side, the the government in the United States made it the responsibility of the airlines to ensure that those people had the right paperwork to enter in the country to which they were flying. So we don't see that sophistication quite yet with what we're doing here today on the virus passports. But I think I think they're going to be sent back. And I think it's going to be on their dime, not on the airline's dime. And they could actually be stuck in a quarantine facility for people before they can actually get the reservation and get out of that country that they weren't allowed into. You know, this all suggests putting it together with you and Shanger saying, especially about China, you know, limiting or cutting off visits through what the end of 2022. That's a long time. That's 18 months. This is this has to be a substantial amount of the missing 25 percent of air travel for you. And it also suggests that going forward and the big question is a lot of these a lot of these problems, a lot of these solutions, if you will, are going to stay in place for a while and that the the impact that COVID had in the first 18 months will continue. And, you know, the Mac will have to deal with that going forward and make plans for a continuation of in many ways, the status quo for an indefinite period of time. Am I right in and how has all of that changed the way airports, not only MSP, but other airports in the country will work going forward? I think you're right that you have to really think about it, because I think if we thought domestic was going to recover with business travel in the second half of the year or the early part of 22, and you might be at full capacity relative to your domestic travel with business and personal back international is going to lag a bit. I think we'll see the EU come on pretty strong. And maybe that'll be more normal in 22. And as Chang said, I think we might be a year off or or things in Asia, which is going to be really difficult. So in the meantime, I think what we have to do is we have to we've got some revenue associated with those things. So what we have to do is trim our belt and that makes it harder to pick the construction projects or the other projects that you're doing around the airport. So some of those things get delayed. So you make, you know, have the ability to balance books. And I think you you are always ready to pounce if if suddenly we declare that, you know, the virus is done and gone and the Asia is open. You want to be able to be the first to be able to jump on that. But meanwhile, you want to be the safest place that people can fly whatever the destination is. And that's how you make your name in this time. Yeah, you bet. It's a time to be observant, a time to be safe and a time to be nimble. Not only in the management of airports, but everything. So Chang, this is your opportunity to summarize our conversation here today. And I suppose to come up with some suggestions for the traveler and if you want suggestions for Rick, too. Well, I'm not sure. I mean, the physician to make suggestions to Rick or other travelers. First, I want to thank you, Rio and Rick, to share your thoughts and terrific questions and terrific answers about the international travel and the airports. I had the privilege to visit it as a PE and Mac. I brought my student to Rick's and office. I was constantly amazed by the great work Mac has been doing. And also, MSP is my favorite airport in the world. To be honest, I like many other airports, but MSP is definitely the most user-friendly airports, the most comfortable airports you can imagine. And I cannot wait to the day I can be back on the road. But in terms of the international travel, I would definitely follow all the advice Rick provided. And each one of them is very practical and very useful. But for me personally, I just cannot. I just need to go back to China. That I can cancel my other travel, domestic, international, to other European countries. But I definitely, definitely need to go back to China. But it's just tremendously difficult. For the past few years, when the rhetoric has been heated between two countries, we imagined many, many different best war scenarios, the war diplomatic breakdown. But once we didn't expect the pandemic, which is just a multiple layers of difficulty for the other things already not going well. And the quarantines, the testing, all of that. But I think that I remember Rick has been advised. I've been told me always keep your positivity, always think positively. So I will think positive. I think we cannot go any lower in term of travel between Asia and the United States. And going forward, we probably can only go better. So that's my final thought. That sounds good. So, Rick, you have the last word here. What would you like to leave as a message with our viewers? Well, I think despite what we've talked about, travel in the United States is safe. People are taking the right precautions. So you go to the airport where you prepared to wear a mask in your airport and your flights. Don't be afraid to take the flights. The airlines and all the airport workers have prepared to make it safe for you. So you can get back to seeing people. If your parents are around in the United States, unlike Chung's, you'll be able to go visit them. And I hope he gets to China really, really soon. Thanks for having me on. Thank you, Rick King of the Mac and Chiang Mai, my co-contributor, co-host in this program. Thank you for organizing this. Greatly appreciate the discussion today. Thank you. Thank you both.