Breeze announces new flights, including ones to RDU’s top unserved destination
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- Breeze adds nonstop service from RDU to San Antonio, Madison and Atlantic City.
- New routes raise Breeze’s RDU network to 37 nonstop destinations, 28 without competition.
- Carrier will base crews at RDU, boosting summer operations to 137 weekly flights.
Breeze Airways flies to more places from Raleigh-Durham International Airport than any other carrier. On Wednesday, it announced three more destinations, including the largest unserved market from RDU.
Breeze will begin flying nonstop to San Antonio, Texas, and Madison, Wisconsin, on May 8 and to Atlantic City, New Jersey, on June 11.
No airline currently serves those cities from RDU, including San Antonio, the seventh-largest city in the country. Nearly 100 people a day fly to or from San Antonio International Airport, with connections on the way, making it the most popular destination from RDU without a nonstop flight, according to airport officials.
Breeze will fly each route twice a week: Thursdays and Sundays to Atlantic City and San Antonio and Mondays and Fridays to Madison. The Madison flights will be seasonal, ending Labor Day weekend.
The new flights bring the number of nonstop destinations for Breeze from RDU to 37, including its first international flight from the Triangle to Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, starting March 4. A second international flight, to Montego Bay, Jamaica, has been postponed until December because of damage on the island from Hurricane Melissa last fall.
Breeze has grown dramatically since debuting in the Triangle in February 2023 with eight flights a week to three cities. The airline more than doubled the number of passengers it served at RDU last year to nearly 660,000.
The Triangle’s strong economy and demographics have helped Breeze thrive at RDU, said Lukas Johnson, the chief commercial officer. Breeze will establish a crew base at the airport in March, with more than 200 pilots and flight crew, and will operate more flights from RDU this summer, 137 a week, than any other airport in its network, Johnson said.
Johnson says Breeze is able to serve so many markets from RDU in part because it uses Airbus A220-300 aircraft that seat 137 passengers — a “Goldilocks” size that’s not too big or too small.
“It’s much more efficient than your smaller regional jets,” he said. “But because it’s smaller you can serve markets that other carriers with larger airplanes can’t make economically work.”
Breeze Airways favors routes not served by other airlines. Of the 37 destinations it now reaches from RDU, the low-cost carrier does not have competition on 28 of them. They range from cities such as San Diego to small places such as Key West, Florida, Bangor, Maine, and Ogdensburg, New York, on the Canadian border.
It also flies to several airports near other metro areas, such as Manchester and Portsmouth in New Hampshire, outside Boston, and White Plains, Islip and Stewart outside New York City. Atlantic City is an hour drive from Philadelphia, while Madison is less than two hours from Milwaukee, which no carrier currently serves nonstop from RDU.
This story was originally published January 28, 2026 at 8:00 AM.
