New routes offer opportunity for budget airlines — and travelers
New routes offer opportunity for budget airlines — and travelers
With spring fast approaching, airlines are bracing for summer vacation season — offering new routes and promotions as people plan to spend warmer days in far-off locations. Part of their effort to court leisure travelers is adding direct flights to less-traveled destinations at cheaper prices.
Thanks to remote work, many airlines are hitting a plateau when it comes to corporate travel, said Hayley Berg, an economist with travel app Hopper.
“And that means airlines need to make up that difference in revenue on the leisure side,” she said.
So airlines are adding direct routes that cater to vacationers domestically and abroad.
“We’ve seen some low-cost carriers expanding shorter routes, like connecting Philadelphia and Pittsburgh for low fares, but also expansion of some of those international carriers into cities like Lisbon, Portugal, and Porto,” she said.
“They’re looking for pockets of opportunity,” said Naveen Eluru, who researches transportation modeling at the University of Central Florida.
He said low-cost carriers are targeting places major airlines ignore to become the only game in town. “Which can potentially generate more revenue than what a major city will generate.”
Right now, those new routes are being rolled out for cheap. So a family that would have driven between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh may choose to fly — on a promotional fare.
“The family saves a lot of money and gets there in three hours. But in a couple of months, they’re so used to this direct flight that even if the price becomes $50 more, they will continue to use this,” Eluru said.
While the hub-and-spoke model isn’t going anywhere, the focus on less-traveled routes has been lucrative for low-cost carriers, said David Slotnick with the Points Guy travel site.
“There’s a new airline, Breeze, that just started flying in 2021, and their whole idea is to basically just connect random city pairs that don’t have any nonstop flights between them. For the most part, they’ve been pretty successful,” he said.
It shows that people who travel are still price-conscious, Slotnick said, and there’s more to the world than New York, London and Paris.
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