Jacksonville trade trips to London gain traction but other big cities have nonstop flights

The Jaguars didn't come home with a win when they flew to London in October 2022, but off the field in Wembley Stadium that Sunday, a meeting between Jacksonville officials and top executives from London-based Paysafe finalized a plan for the company to open its North American headquarters in Jacksonville.

The session in the stadium came after a year of meetings between Paysafe and Jacksonville chamber leaders, both in person and on Zoom calls, setting the stage for putting the final touches on the talks while the Jaguars and Denver Broncos clashed on the field .

"We basically agreed to the entire framework between halftime and the end of the third quarter," said Aundra Wallac e, president of JAXUSA Partnership, the economic development arm of JAX Chamber. "A lot of work had already gone into it, but we were able to finish out those parts at that point in time."

A month later, the fintech company joined city and state leaders for an announcement in Jacksonville of a headquarters that will bring up to 600 jobs.

Paysafe is the biggest success Jacksonville has scored since 2013 while using the Jaguars annual trip to London for football games as a way to crack into the growing trade lane between the United Kingdom and Florida. This year's Jaguars games in London will mark the 11th time in 12 years that a trade delegation has flown overseas, a string broken only by the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.

The homecoming message from those trips in the early years was "stay tuned" as chamber officials said it takes time to build a brand for Jacksonville in the global arena.

But since 2021, London-based SmartStream Technologies opened a Jacksonville office with 20 employees in June of that year. Paysafe opened its new headquarters in October 2023. Primark, which is based in Dublin, Ireland and has an extensive chain of stores in Ireland and the United Kingdom, opened a Jacksonville distribution center earlier this year for supplying Primark's expansion from Florida to Texas.

Ellerman City Liners — which is based in London and operates trans-Atlantic shipping for cargo at ports in the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States — put Jacksonville's port on its service route in January 2023.

Jacksonville officials had meetings with executives from all of those companies during their annual trade delegation trips to London.

Gov. DeSantis and U.K. picked Jacksonville for trade agreement signing

When Gov. Ron DeSantis and the United Kingdom's secretary of state for business and trade Kemi Badenoch signed a memorandum of understanding in November for the Florida-United Kingdom trade partnership, they inked it at a ceremony in Jacksonville. Mayor Donna Deegan had urged U.K. officials to do the signing in Jacksonville when she met them during the 2023 trade trip.

Whether those announcements herald a steady stream of U.K.-related businesses coming to Jacksonville in the coming years or will just end up being a drop in the proverbial pond will depend on Jacksonville getting consistent results from the trade trips. Jacksonville still lags Orlando, Miami and Tampa in the competition for turning that connection into jobs.

University of North Florida professor Andres Gallo , director of the international business program at UNF, said in the wake of Brexit in 2020 when the United Kingdom withdrew from the European Union, it is looking for new trading partners around the world. In the United States, Florida fits the bill because it is one of the fastest-growing states so it's important for Jacksonville to position itself for that investment opportunity, Gallo said.

Miami and Orlando are longer-established than Jacksonville for attracting international investment but Jacksonville has an advantage in offering a relatively lower cost for establishing a business, he said.

"I think there is more awareness of Jacksonville," he said of his experiences over the years traveling to universities in the U.K. "When you go there, there's a real interest in Florida. I think that with the Jaguars being in London, that has helped with bringing the name of Jacksonville to the forefront."

Jacksonville's lack of non-stop flights to London limits U.K. ties

Deegan and former mayors Alvin Brown and Lenny Curry all have joined the trade trips during their terms over the past decade. In Deegan's first trip in 2023, she was in the room for in-person meetings with specific companies and also had a bigger megaphone to talk up Jacksonville when she made appearances on Times Radio, which broadcasts across the U.K., and on Sky News that also reaches into Europe.

"For us, the whole goal is to really create that pipeline between not only Jacksonville and London but Jacksonville and global economic development that will help us continue to grow here," Deegan said.

She said that means telling people abroad that Jacksonville is a low-tax city with a great quality of life and transportation network located on the ocean with the St. Johns River running through it.

"It is basically a sales job for Jacksonville," she said.

That sales job by Jacksonville lacks at least one selling point that other big cities already have in place — direct flights to London.

Orlando, Miami and Tampa have multiple flights taking off each week from their airports on non-stop routes to London, and they've been adding more of those flights.

When Tampa's airport launched a new flight to London in November 2022 , Virgin Atlantic founder Sir Richard Branson stepped off the plane wearing a Tampa Bay Buccaneers jersey. Jacksonville officials would like to replicate that scene with a Jaguars jersey in the picture.

The Jacksonville Aviation Authority has been working on getting international non-stop flights. The aviation authority recently announced daily non-stop international flights will return to Jacksonville when Air Canada resumes that service next May for the first time since 2019.

Canada sends more visitors to Florida than any other country. The United Kingdom — comprised of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland — ranks second for visits to Florida.

Wallace said other cities with non-stop flights to London have an edge over Jacksonville.

"It is something we have to overcome," he said. "I would not be truthful if I did not say that if I had direct flights from Jacksonville to the U.K., I think that speeds up the conversation."

He said one constraint on expanding international flights to Jacksonville is the worldwide backlog of orders for Boeing planes.

"We're going to keep hammering at that conversation," Wallace said. "Hopefully, things break through sooner rather than later, but the airlines are at the mercy of those who build the the aircraft."

Jags lease with city allows at least one London game per year

The attention by Jacksonville on the United Kingdom kicked off when Jaguars owner Shad Khan made London a "home away from home" for the Jaguars.

That football connection will likely continue for years because the $1.4 billion stadium renovation deal between Khan and the city resulted in a 30-year lease extension for the team to keep playing at the stadium. In that lease, the city and the Jaguars agreed the team can play at least one home game each year in London where the Jaguars have played more often than any other NFL team for the league's International Series.

Football still is in the shadow of soccer, the king of sports in the United Kingdom as it is around the world. But the NFL has made London a yearly focus of its efforts to attract international attention. Wallace said the effort the Jaguars have made in building a United Kingdom fan base adds buzz to the annual trade delegation trips that started in 2013.

"What we were doing was taking advantage of a unique opportunity that allowed Jacksonville to be on an international stage," Wallace said.

In the early years, a lot of the effort involved building the Jacksonville brand in the United Kingdom where Florida was well-known but not Jacksonville.

Even after two years of those trips to London, Jacksonville still was an unknown quantity to Alastair Lukies in 2015 when he was a business ambassador for then-prime minister David Cameron and started helping Jacksonville make business connections in the U.K.

"I didn't have a clue, to be honest with you," Lukies said.

Lukies, who is a leader in London's fintech industry, said since then, Jacksonville's own fintech sector, with companies like FIS and Black Knight, is viewed in London as a "very viable option if you're setting up in the U.S."

"I think there's definitely a tailwind now," he said.

Lukies said Florida has always been a big destination for vacations but in the post-Brexit era, that tourism-based view of Florida is changing as wealthy investors move out of Silicon Valley to other states such as Texas and to Miami and Palm Beach in Florida.

"In terms of an ecosystem of big investors, it's starting to become recognized as a business as well as a fun spot," Lukies said of Florida. "I think that's the big opportunity Jacksonville has."

Jacksonville's weather, taxes, and overall quality of life offer appeal for U.K. businesses that don't necessarily want to locate in a more internationally known city, Lukies said. But they do want non-stop flight service.

"No one wants to fly all the way to Atlanta or Miami and then get on another flight so I think that's going to be a very important next step," he said.

Zoom meetings only go so far in building Jacksonville's brand

For the business and government leaders in the Jacksonville delegation to London, the trip is a way to pitch the city for new business operations while also meeting face-to-face with international businesses already here.

"There is only so much you can do over phone calls and Zoom," said Chelsea Kavanagh, spokeswoman for JaxPort. "Face-to-face meetings are essential to maintaining relationships and growing businesses with our current customers."

While the London trips around the Jaguars games get the most attention, they are part of a year-round effort to meet with business leaders in the United Kingdom and build relationships with them. Wallace said he travels to the United Kingdom two to three times a year for in-person meetings and also stays in contact by telephone with companies on the chamber's recruitment list.

The trade trips to London involve a blitz of meetings with individual companies, trade groups, and government officials. Wallace said for him, that can amount to meetings with dozens of companies over the course of three to four days. Some will be follow-up meetings and others will be first-time sessions.

Global reach: International service from Jacksonville returns with Air Canada flights to Toronto

The recruitment focuses on four areas: financial services, life sciences, advanced manufacturing and maritime logistics.

Wallace said when DeSantis signed the trade partnership agreement last year, the chamber organized a roundtable beforehand where executives from a dozen Jacksonville companies doing business in the four target areas in the United Kingdom met with high-ranking U.K. government leaders in a JAX Chamber conference room.

"If you look back 10 years before last year, you could never have envisioned we could be in a position to do just that," Wallace said.

Now Jacksonville's challenge is to take the foundation established since 2013, move definitively beyond the "stay tuned" era and bring home jobs from the London trips.

This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Jacksonville trade trips to London gain traction but other big cities have nonstop flights