Americans have been traveling in unseen quantities for more than a year and will soon have two new low-cost airlines.
The two hope to attract passengers by covering minor routes on the network spanning the United States.
Avelo Airlines said Thursday it will begin flying this month to 11 destinations from Burbank, California. The new company plans to add other routes to the western United States in terms of increasing its Boeing 737 fleet.
Avelo was launched by a veteran airline executive who thinks there is room for other low-cost ones alongside those already on the market.
“There are too few seats offered by low-cost airlines in the United States. That’s why we think the opportunity is huge,” said Avelo president and CEO Andrew Levy. “Passengers really want a cheap way to go from Point A to Point B.”
Waiting to take off is Breeze Airways, the new creation of David Neeleman, the executive who helped launch Canadian WestJet before founding JetBlue and Brazilian airline Blava.
Breeze plans to fly to “neglected, forgotten” destinations, including many that have been abandoned by major airlines. Breeze is conducting test flights for the Federal Aviation Administration and could announce details of its routes and prices next week and begin transporting passengers in May.
Plans for the two airlines began before the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, but both began at a time when Americans are looking to resume their travels after more than a year of closures. More than 1 million Americans have been flying every day in the last month and the numbers are expected to go up in the summer.
The last new airline in the United States was Virgin America, which began flying in 2007 and disappeared after being acquired by Alaska Airlines for $ 2.6 billion in 2016.
AVELO
Levy is a former Allegiant Air and United Airlines executive who has finally achieved a year-long dream of launching his own airline.
Avelo’s strategy comes directly from the low-cost airline manual initially written by Southwest in the 1970s and copied by others, including Allegiant. Part of the strategy is to limit itself to secondary airports, which have lower costs and less congestion – planes land, take on new passengers and take off quickly, spending more time in the air and less on the ground.
BREEZE
Breeze has not detailed where it will begin operations, although it has hinted that it will be in the southeastern United States, including Florida, a popular destination for pleasure travel. Neeleman says the timing is right.
“Pleasure traffic is going crazy right now. A lot of people have been vaccinated and younger, healthier people aren’t afraid to travel,” Neeleman said in an interview. “There is a lot of accumulated demand, probably greater than the number of seats available.”