We are connected! And, not just through our smartphones. Denver International Airport can get you where you want to go “in-person” in the world!
Every time DEN pins down a new stop, it’s adding real money to our economy by bringing the world closer to us. Our airport team has been busy, announcing new and growing nonstop service to London, Panama City, Paris, Vancouver and Zurich (and all in just three months). DEN reports that international travel has grown by 40 percent since 2013 (the year the nonstop to Tokyo was launched). These flights signal that our companies are doing more and more business around the world because getting international flights like these is all about the numbers. Airlines choose markets based on that region’s ability to fill the seats helping to ensure that the flight is financially viable.
To show our ongoing support for these investments by our airlines, we’ll be using one of those nonstops to take more than 100 of our metro area leaders to Munich this fall as part of our Leadership Foundation’s annual Leadership Exchange. This trip marks the first time we will take our program to another continent (Germany, here we come) to learn about innovative, bold ideas with regard to business’ role in helping develop our future workforce to ensuring we are creating communities that allow workers to live where they work. As always, the public, private and nonprofit sectors will travel together, studying best practices that we can bring back to implement in Colorado. We have so many examples of great successes that started from a learning on one of our LEX trips – the Metro Mayors Caucus, our commuter rail planning, the Denver School of Science and Technology and the Biennial of the Americas, to name a few.
Creating these shared experiences where we build close working relationships and a shared vision of what is possible makes us more effective at getting work done. As a matter of fact, four years ago the Brookings Institute said it’s our leadership, what they call “leadership with a worldview,” that makes our region so competitive globally. And, directly combining our leadership programs with our global connections is ensuring that worldview only gets stronger.
Kelly Brough is the president and CEO of the Denver Metro Chamber.