There is admittedly much in the world that confuses me, but near the top of that list has been Avelo’s network strategy. What exactly is the plan? After several discussions and some research, I think I get where the airline is heading. Avelo’s recent announcement of flying from its small-city bases to the big cities of Atlanta and Chicago seems to fit this strategy, so that’s a good sign.
The overarching network ideal is basically the opposite of Allegiant. At Allegiant, the airline has long focused on flying people from various small origin airports to big-city destinations with aircraft bases like Las Vegas or Orlando. Avelo, on the other hand, wants to fly people from a few, small origin aircraft base airports like New Haven or Charlotte/Concord to a variety of big destinations.
These, of course, are not the same kind of small airports that Allegiant cares about. Allegiant wants those small airports with very limited service nearby. On top of that, it wants cities that don’t have nonstop service to the big destination it plans to serve. Instead, travelers get stuck with high fares and connections on regional jets until Allegiant steps in. Those kinds of cities don’t work for Avelo’s model.
Instead, Avelo needs secondary airports in bigger cities. It needs to serve airports that have access to a big population center — preferably in a way where those people find the secondary airport more convenient than the primary — but it needs to have a fair number of people around or it doesn’t work. And that is the core of Avelo’s market.
This is not readily apparent at all based on Avelo’s network and history, but it is slowly moving in this direction. Let’s just think about some of the airline’s plans that didn’t fit this strategy:
- The first Avelo base was Burbank. Yes, it was a secondary airport in a big market, but it had a ton of competition to good-sized cities. So, Avelo had to serve the tiny cities like Pasco and Salem. It abandoned the airport last month.
- In 2022, Avelo opened an aircraft base at Orlando’s main airport. That seems weird, but it acted more like an Allegiant-style operation there. Now in March it’s down to just other base flying from Orlando to New Haven and the two Wilmingtons.
- Meanwhile in 2023, Avelo decided to put a base in Las Vegas. Again, that’s weird. It made it until 2025 before being shut down.
- There was briefly a base in Santa Rosa for about a year starting in 2024. That is actually the kind of airport that would make sense except… it had nonstops to a lot of the most important cities already and Avelo was primarily serving small places, as it did from Burbank. It’s gone now too.
- Avelo went into Hartford, the primary airport closest to its base in New Haven. That didn’t last long.
All of those are gone now, or appropriately shrunk, but two outliers remain:
- Avelo opened a base at Raleigh/Durham in 2023. This is no secondary airport, and it still exists today in the system. If we look at March of next year, RDU has flights to smaller cities of Albany, Grand Rapids, and Rochester. It also connects to the big base in New Haven and there is still a Punta Cana leisure flight. So many strategies in one place.
- March of next year has Wilmington, NC as the airline’s second largest base behind New Haven. This may be a smaller city, but it is not a secondary airport. It is just a market that apparently lacked service to some cities, so Avelo stepped in. It must be pretty happy considering the volume of flights there.
Both of these can help to fuel the New Haven operation by having aircraft that fly up at the right time when space is available since there isn’t room for any more based aircraft there. But you don’t keep these operations just for that. They have to work in some form or another on their own.
So, you can see my confusion here. But the airline is making some progress in this regard. Its only major base is New Haven and that fits this plan perfectly. It’s a secondary airport in a big metro area where the airport is very convenient to a lot of people, and it will serve 27 destinations during spring break next year (as of now). Then there’s Wilmington, Delaware which fits the bill next to Philly and will hit 16 destinations when its third based aircraft arrives in March. The same sort of goes for Concord outside Charlotte, though I don’t think that’s as convenient to as big a swath of the population. It will get its second based aircraft and rise to 10 destinations in March.
Even Lakeland fits this mold. But wait, you say, it’s Florida. That’s a destination. It is, but there is a pretty large population in Polk County which would find Lakeland more convenient, and only some of them live in a swamp. I am not surprised to see a San Juan flight. That should do well. If Lakeland is about the origin, it has a whole lot better chance of success than if it’s trying to be a key destination. (The one exception to that is the announcement of flights from Detroit starting in February. Lakeland is the spring training home of the Detroit Tigers.)
Slowly but surely, those bases are starting to trend more toward big cities. We have the addition of flights to both Atlanta and Chicago/O’Hare from Concord and Wilmington (DE) with Lakeland getting an Atlanta flight too. That is where we should expect to see growth in the future, because it’s really the only thing that might possibly make sense. You can’t connect a small city to another small city and expect success.
With all that in mind, Avelo’s network still looks like quite the hodgepodge of ideas. My sense is that all of these routes exist because the airline went on tangents before. As long as they work, they stay. But if they don’t, I’d expect we will see more of this “secondary airport to big destination growth” in the future. That is where Avelo wants to be, and it’s really the only thing that makes sense.
