Breeze announces RDU flights to 2 more cities. Where they’ll go, when they’ll start.
Breeze Airways on Tuesday announced nonstop flights from the Triangle to two more destinations: Tampa and Las Vegas.
The airline will fly to both cities from Raleigh-Durham International Airport three days a week starting Sept. 7. Breeze now offers nonstops to 11 cities from RDU.
Breeze was largely unknown to Triangle travelers until last November, when the airline announced it would begin flying to three cities starting in February. Even before that service got started, the carrier announced it would begin flying to two more cities in May.
The week of its inaugural flights in February, Breeze announced three more destinations from RDU starting this summer, including Los Angeles.
Like other low-cost carriers, Breeze has tended to fly to markets not served by other airlines. Breeze has no competition on about 93% of its routes, according to founder and CEO David Neeleman.
But with Tampa and Las Vegas, the airline has chosen competitive routes from RDU. Four airlines now fly between the Triangle and Tampa and three carriers fly to Las Vegas.
Neeleman, who visited the Triangle on Tuesday to speak to a gathering of business and economic development people, said the airline sees untapped potential with both routes.
“We have a pretty good team that does this stuff, and they feel like there’s more traffic there than the flights that can take people,” he said in an interview. “So we think that the market can sustain it based on how vibrant and big this market is.”
In addition, Neeleman said, Breeze will fly on days of peak demand for those two cities — Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday — when some travelers might now be discouraged from flying because of higher fares and fewer available seats.
Breeze is the fifth airline that Neeleman has started since the 1980s. They include Morris Air, which was bought and absorbed by Southwest, as well as JetBlue, WestJet of Canada and Azul Brazilian Airlines.
Neeleman chose to launch Breeze in the spring of 2021 when the industry was still recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic. He says the company is responding to consolidation in the airline industry that began in 2010 and resulted in higher prices and reductions in service to many cities. In recent years, he said, airline revenues have remained steady even with tens of millions fewer passengers.
“We think it’s just because travel has gotten more expensive and less convenient,” he said. “We know that if it’s more convenient and less expensive, more people fly. So we saw that opportunity.”
The airline now flies both short distance and transcontinental flights on a fleet of Embraer 190/195 and Airbus A220-300 planes. The company has ordered 80 additional A220s, with options for 40 more.
Breeze has contributed to the post-pandemic rebound in air travel at RDU; the airport is on pace to handle more travelers this year than in 2019, its previous busiest with more than 14 million passengers.
Since January, airlines have added 40 new routes from RDU, including 20 to new destinations. People can fly nonstop from the Triangle to 65 places, up from a pre-pandemic peak of 57.
Breeze and another 2021 startup carrier, Avelo Airlines, account for a dozen of those new destinations. Like Breeze, Avelo looks for underserved markets and on Tuesday became the only carrier to fly nonstop from RDU to Memphis and Rochester, New York.
This story was originally published June 14, 2023 at 11:50 AM.
