Las Vegas-based Allegiant Air today announced a $75 million investment to make Austin-Bergstrom International Airport a base of operations for the company.
Allegiant will hire at least 89 people locally, including pilots, flight attendants, mechanics and ground personnel, and will house three Airbus A320 aircraft in the city.
The budget carrier has already served Austin since 2013 with 14 nonstop routes to small and midsize cities, including Orlando, Cincinnati, Albuquerque, and Pittsburgh. But today’s announcement means more Austin-based jobs and likely new routes too.
Allegiant operates an “out-and-back” network, with exclusively nonstop flights, rather than a “hub-and-spoke” network typical of major carriers.
U.S. air travel has returned to about 75% of pre-pandemic levels, according to statistics from the Transportation Security Administration. On Monday, 1.56 million people passed through TSA checkpoints, compared to just 108,310 on the same weekday last year. Daily air travel in the U.S. was about 2.3 million travelers before the pandemic.
Drew Wells, Allegiant’s senior vice president of revenue, commented that the new Austin base will mean “opportunities for expanded hours, as well as more – and more frequent – flight offerings for visitors and locals alike.”
Allegiant’s announcement comes just days after Dallas-based Southwest Airlines announced two new routes out of Austin starting in June, serving Miami and Destin/Fort Walton Beach. Southwest’s expansion was in turn a response to new routes announced by American Airlines,
American is looking to challenge Southwest’s dominance at Austin-Bergstrom. The latter airline historically has carried more than twice as many passengers in and out of Austin. Just before the pandemic, American announced twice daily flights to Boston and San Jose, which is the destination airport for Silicon Valley.
In a news release at the time, Vasu Raja, American’s Vice President of Network Strategy, conceded that the Austin expansion was “not our traditional hub and spoke routing,” but noted that it would help to better serve the city’s burgeoning tech community.
Last month, American announced additional routes out of Austin, bringing its total destinations to 26. The new routes include twice daily flights to Washington Dulles starting August 17, and daily flights to Nashville, Las Vegas, Orlando, and New Orleans starting May 6.
