Dear Camp Families,
Happy New Year! In an effort to constantly improve, we have made some changes to our airport routine for this coming summer and want to explain both the “what” and the “why” behind these changes to you.
The “WHAT?”
Starting with Summer 2017, we are no longer creating a recommended flight list for our major cities. Instead, we expanded our arrival and departure flight windows. The new arrival window is 9:00am – 11:30am and families are welcome to choose any flight that lands before 11:30am in Denver. We will meet all arriving campers at their gates (except JOLI campers). Our staff will escort campers to collect their bags and then congregate at Baggage Claim #10 until it is time to load the shuttles for the drive to camp. JOLI campers are expected to link up at Baggage Claim #10 with their bags.
The new flight windowdeparting Denver is 10:15am – 3:00pm. Again, families are welcome to select any airline that departs from Denver International Airport in this travel window. Instead of bringing all our departing campers to the airport at the same time, they leave camp in waves, based on their flight time. Flights to just about every city in the Continental US are available non-stop within this window. We recommend that families select the earliest available flight within the window.
The “WHY?”
Quite simply, we made the window wider to accommodate earlier non-stop flights to the coasts. We noticed that the 4-5pm flights to Boston, Washington DC, and New York were the ones most commonly delayed, causing additional problems and leading to incredibly long days for our campers. To combat these issues, we adjusted our travel window to accommodate earlier non-stop flights to our larger US coastal cities. Campers leaving on those flights will have to leave the ranch significantly earlier in the morning, but we hope that by enabling our East Coast families to select earlier flight times it will mean fewer delays and allow
campers to arrive home at a more reasonable time. Again, please select the most appropriate flight for each citywithin the travel window.
As done in the past, we will create region/session based email lists (ex: New York area 1st session, Bay Area 2nd Session, etc.) so that families in the same region and session are able to self-coordinate about details as well as Unaccompanied Minor status.
Our Unaccompanied Minor contact person is Kenny Shuster. Please list his name and our main camp phone number (303) 261-8214 on any airline forms.
If you have any questions, please email transportation@ramahoutdoors.org.
Thank you,
Rabbi Eliav Bock, Camp Director
Lisa Holstein, Office Manager
Melannie Levine, Airport Coordinator