Offering twice a week service come December 20 on 166-seat MD-80s to an airport near Orlando that isn’t the airport US Airways, Delta, or Southwest fly into. Let’s be clear here, Allegiant is trying to get enough vacationers to fly on them, and book hotels and cars through them to make money in the Charlotte Concord catchment area. Allegiant is profitable and stable but that does not mean that Allegiant’s flight schedule necessarily is. They experiment with markets, and if things don’t work out, they’ll reduce the number of flights a week they offer (seasonally or otherwise) or even drop a market entirely. Just ask Kinston and Wilmington, both of which have had Allegiant flights to Orlando Sanford in recent years but no longer do.
And for the record, Allegiant currently serves Asheville (AVL), Greensboro (GSO), and Greenville-Spartanburg (GSP) and seems to be doing well in all three as they offer flights from each to three or four destination in Florida (Orlando Sanford, St. Petersburg, Ft. Lauderdale and Punta Gorda from GSP and AVL, no Punta Gorda from GSO but the other three are offered.)
And here’s a link to a USAToday story on Allegiant’s announcement, which included adding 10 new cities and 18 new routes.
Bonus observation: The Allegiant announcement makes the politics of the regional authority that Stan Campbell and friends want to establish so that Jerry Orr can run Charlotte Douglas International Airport without any interference even more interesting. Remember, the regional authority would oversee just CLT, and not the other airports (like the one in Concord) in the area. And we have Cabarrus County, which would appoint a member to the regional authority’s board, also having their name on a federal grant application that essentially says that Jerry Orr has done a horrible job of meeting the needs of travelers in their part of the region.
