Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport (ATL) may be the busiest airport in the world and the hub of Delta Air Lines (DAL) but travelers frequently complain that many other Southern cities are underserved by airlines — in particular for flights between two smaller cities.
While launched in 2021 out of Hollywood Burbank Airport (BUR), Avelo Airlines quickly found a market running flights to many Southern states and Florida. It currently operates in markets such as Georgia's Savannah, Tennessee's Knoxville, South Carolina's Charleston and Myrtle Beach, and North Carolina's Charlotte and Wilmington. And for the summer, it announced a new spate of routes to several Southern cities.
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These include a biweekly flight between Tweed-New Haven Airport (HVN) in Southern Connecticut and Charlotte's Concord-Padgett Regional Airport (JQF) departing Tuesdays and Sundays and a flight from Tweed-New Haven to Atlanta running four times a week.
These are the new Southern cities to which Avelo flies
Both flights will launch on June 14 while the Charlotte route will also start running four times a week by the summer. Throughout the year, Avelo has been launching new routes to Florida from different parts of the U.S. Some of the most recent additions include a new one-hour flight between Orlando and Miami set to start on June 7 and a route to Lakeland International Airport (LAL) located halfway between Tampa and Orlando from Tweed-New Haven also starting next month.
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Avelo is promoting the new routes as both an expansion into the South and a convenience for those who live in Southern Connecticut and would have previously had to drive two hours to either JFK or Newark International Airport (EWR). Last year, it made a similar push to expand service from Central Wisconsin Airport (CWA). Mainstream airlines like such as Delta and United Airlines (UAL) have a few flights out of there but the entire region is generally underserved.
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Avelo promises residents 'even more travel options'
"We are excited to offer Southern Connecticut residents even more travel options with today’s additions of Atlanta and Charlotte," Avelo Founder and CEO Andrew Levy said in a statement. "When you consider our industry-leading reliability and caring Soul of Service, it is clear why 2 million people have flown Avelo at Tweed since 2021."
As a business strategy, low-cost airlines will often pick a market that has been overlooked or is generally underserved in order to win over travelers before competition moves in. In 2023, New York-based JetBlue Airways (JBLU) launched new flights to San Juan in Puerto Rico from Raleigh-Durham, N.C. and Tampa while the island territory is now also served by Spirit Airlines (SAVE) and Frontier (FRON) (the latter is resuming a route between Newark Liberty and San Juan this summer.)
With the newly-built Felipe Carrillo Puerto Tulum International Airport opening to international airlines in March, airlines such as Delta, American Airlines (AAL) and Spirit have all announced routes to the Mexican resort town popular with travel influencers and formerly available only by a drive from Cancun.
The latter airline, however, has had to delay their flight to Tulum from Orlando indefinitely after Pratt & Whitney issued a recall for the engine of the plane it had slated for the route.
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