Seeing the news of the limited transport on Alaska Airlines to Ironman Alaska, I reached out to their CEO Ben Minicucci. Ben and I raced Ironman Canada together in 1995. (by the way, he did it in 11:00.22) after a massive year of training. We are old classmates from the military/air force/RMC days. Today he races gravel and cross. He is “one of us”, not any old corporate exec that does not get athlete needs while traveling. He routinely travels with his bikes.
In any case, Ben gets your pain. He did not even know there was an Ironman in Alaska and as soon as he heard about the challenge this morning, he got on it immediately to try to get all your bikes up. They are going to do everything they can to get the bikes there on time and it sounds like they have been able to free up cargo capacity to make room for bikes. The question is how much.
From what he shared summarizing internal communication, the operational people had told Ironman many months ago to communicate to athletes to look into alternate plans (shipping) but that may have not gone out (I am not a participant so don’t know what went out). But that changes nothing today.
In any case, you all got the main guy trying to help and now it is question of how many bikes are yet to go and how much capacity they can free up from cargo, but that’s different from “make other plans”.
I asked him if I can share a synopsis of what they are trying to get done and he told me I could go ahead, so none of this is official because I don’t work for the airline, just trying to send a note of comfort that they will try everything they can in time.
Ben get’s that if Air Canada sent him a message 1 week before his first Ironman that they could not get his bike to Penticton he would have been devastated.
I hope it works out, but on my end, seeing the panic, I reached out to the guy who can make the most happen. Now its a question of who is flying when and how many bikes per flight and how much cargo.
Let’s just hope that the CEO message can make things happen in operations. At least the message has gone down the totem pole, but in a roughly $5B market cap company, what the CEO wants and what actually happens can be quite different. Heck in my own tiny company what I want done and what actually gets done are sometimes different animals, and most of the time, you have to let the staff do what they think is best for the enterprise and not tell them how to do their job because if you are doing good leadership, the team generally knows better than the CEO. But in some cases, teams can operate on incomplete information at least on what is more important as a priority at the corp level. I am hoping that the optics of good customer service around an Ironman that is 1x per year, is higher priority than today’s cargo which while critical for the state of Alaska may be deferred several days or moved up several days to open up cargo space in a critical 1 week window for bikes.
As triathletes, I think we all want their CEO to tell the staff how to do this job this time LOL! We gotta pull the secret Ironman club handshake where it helps us in the biz world. Its like being alumni of the same university who help each other (oh wait, we’re also both alumni of the same place)!!!
Fingers crossed they can make things smooth for everyone. It would truly suck to train all year for an Ironman and not get bike on race day!!!
Thanks for the info. According to the Facebook group, a lot of people decided (after totally flipping out about this) to ship via Bike Flights to a local bike shop which offered to accept any deliveries.
Edit: Sorry, didn’t see the other thread about this first.
Thanks for the info. According to the Facebook group, a lot of people decided (after totally flipping out about this) to ship via Bike Flights to a local bike shop which offered to accept any deliveries.
Edit: Sorry, didn’t see the other thread about this first.
In fairness to those seeking alternate means, they only sought it out based on the first communication from Alaska Airlines who themselves felt they needed to say something due to Ironman not proactively informing athletes of limited cargo capacity on flights and to consider other means!
People on the IM Alaska FB page have been freaking the fvck out. Typical FB race page fashion, however I do think IM kind of underestimated logistics in getting to a pretty remote place, oh well.
I was intending on traveling with my bike, but when I got the email from Alaska Airlines this week, I pivoted and chose to ship my bike via FedEx. Lucky for me, we have a corporate FedEx account so my work “technically” paid for it, which is nice since it was over $1K to ship…
It would be very nice for IM to consider the available resources for visiting athletes and their families when selecting venues. I suppose their attitude is “people sign up, so what should we care?â€, but that is short term thinking. It turns a lot of events into one-time bucket list events, where people might otherwise return.
Two day Kona is exhibit A. Alaska is exhibit B this month. There are countless other events like IMMD that are prohibitive just because they are so ill equipped to handle the event, even if the local municipality plays ball with IM.
Can someone explain why it’s harder to get bikes to Alaska than Kona?
As others have mentioned there are definitely limited commercial flights in/out of Juneau vs Kona. Currently only AK Air and Delta AFAIK.
As those attending will find out, the single runway in Juneau requires a specific approach for jets. This typically means 737s as largest supported aircraft vs. much larger aircraft available to service Kona. I think both AK Air and Delta have been certified by FAA to specifically operate 737s in/out of Juneau.
Standard passenger flights to there likely carry extra cargo. Bikes certainly don’t push the weight limits, but I’m sure they’re a volume complication vs. weight/balance.
I don’t know what large shippers such as FedEx and UPS do for servicing Juneau. They could be contracting with AK Air and some of the smaller local cargo carriers if they don’t have cargo jets for Juneau.
A lot of SC AK participants have sent their bikes early using AK Air Cargo to a local shop or to friends that live there.