Avelo has been hard to pin down, as I’ve written in several previous posts. But now, flush with a new cash infusion, the airline has decided it is time to finally focus on one thing. Whether this will work or not remains unclear, but it is certainly heartening to see an actual, cohesive strategy coming into focus for the first time.
Back in November, I wrote about my understanding of the airline’s strategy:
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.
And to build on that, it wasn’t just about flying from small origins but small, secondary-airport origins near big cities. The problem with this idea was that it did a whole lot of things that did not fit that strategy at all, and that’s even after considering all of the former base flying that had been removed like Burbank and Orlando. So it was hard to reconcile this throughout the network. Now, however, Avelo has announced the change that will finally bring a cohesiveness to the company.
- Raleigh/Durham will close as a base, that is not a secondary airport, nor is it small
- Wilmington (NC) will close as a base, that is small but it is not a secondary airport in a large market
- Phoenix/Mesa will close as a base, that was only for ICE deportation flying which is no longer needed as a cash grab
- McKinney (TX) will open as a base later this year, that is the smallest of origins since it has no service today but it is a true secondary airport for the Metroplex
- Avelo will return six B737-700s, leaving only two in the fleet in addition to the 14 B737-800s as it awaits delivery of the Embraer E2s
This is a big deal for the airline. It will now focus itself around five bases, all of which are small origin airports that can be considered secondary airports.
- Concord, NC (Charlotte)
- Lakeland, FL (Orlando and Tampa)
- McKinney, TX (Dallas/Fort Worth) later this year
- New Haven, CT (NYC/Westchester)
- Wilmington, DE (Philly)
Of these, New Haven is far and away the one true rock star in the network. The others are works in progress. McKinney, however, should be fantastic. They are building the terminal in that fast-growing area, and Avelo will be the first one in. That’s a great opportunity, and Avelo just has to hope others don’t dive in as well.
With this, Avelo can get rid of most of the distractions that had prevented a singular strategy from existing over the years. Yes, one of those was deportation flying. I know protesters probably think that they won some victory by yelling loudly, but I can’t imagine that’s what happened. The ICE flying was a lifeline. The airline was low on cash, and that was a way to get cash. It was never strategic. Now that it has raised new funding, it doesn’t need that short-term money-grab and can instead focus on building its strategy.
Besides, now that the Department of Homeland Services is buying six B737-700s from Daedalus, the company that I believe holds the deportation flying contract, we can piece all of this together. I haven’t seen any officially confirmation that these are the Avelo airplanes going to the feds, but that would certainly make it easy for Avelo to just walk away from all of this.
So, now we have Avelo reboot number, well, I’m not sure what number to call this. Now the only routes that don’t touch one of the five bases are RDU – Rochester (NY) and Wilmington (NC) – Baltimore, Nashville, and Tampa. Those will now be funded through other bases, and they probably will actually help with aircraft flow and utilization between bases, especially New Haven which is so constrained.
Just look at how much has been shed in the last year. The West Coast network is gone. Hartford is gone. International is gone.
Avelo Route Map excluding HVN/ILG/USA/LAL bases generated by the Great Circle Mapper – copyright © Karl L. Swartz.
Green is still flying in Apr, Red was just canceled, Yellow was flying last Apr but since canceled
To me, this looks like Avelo’s sink-or-swim moment. It has new money, new airplanes on order, and a strategy. Now we get to see if it will actually work. All of those distractions over the years are gone, so there are no more excuses.
