Avelo Airlines cancels 2 routes from RDU, including an international destination
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Avelo cancels Montego Bay and Fort Myers RDU routes after low seat sales.
- Breeze Airways challenges Avelo at RDU, overlapping on several routes.
- Avelo shifts focus to East Coast after ceasing California-based operations.
Avelo Airlines is canceling nonstop service to two destinations from Raleigh-Durham International Airport, including one of two international flights it introduced earlier this year.
The budget airline will discontinue flights to Montego Bay, Jamaica, and Fort Myers, Florida, in early January. The airline has competition on both routes from low-cost competitor Breeze Airways, which already flies to Fort Myers and announced last month that it will begin flying to Montego Bay on March 5.
Avelo introduced its twice-weekly Montego Bay flights in February, and began flying between RDU and Fort Myers in 2023. Both flights will cease the first week of January because the airline wasn’t able to sell enough seats on its Boeing 737 aircraft, said spokeswoman Courtney Goff.
“Unfortunately, we aren’t seeing high enough demand to account for the large capacity of our planes,” Goff wrote in an email.
Avelo will also suspend its twice-weekly flights to Wilmington, Delaware, on Dec. 1. Goff said that service may return “as we continue to measure what demand seasons work for that route at RDU.”
Montego Bay was one of three international destinations that Avelo planned to start from RDU this year. The carrier announced in March that it would begin flying nonstop to the Bahamas in June but canceled the service before it even began because of poor sales.
The airline still flies twice a week to Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, where it will have competition from American Airlines starting in December and from Breeze starting in March.
Avelo made its debut at RDU in May 2022 with flights to its East Coast base in New Haven, Connecticut. The start-up airline specialized in routes not served by other airlines. Less than a year later, it began flying between RDU and six cities in Florida, including Fort Myers.
Avelo will begin 2026 with nonstop flights to a half dozen destinations from RDU. It will have competition from Breeze Airways on all but one of those.
Breeze made its debut at RDU in early 2023, with service to three cities, and has grown aggressively. It now flies nonstop to 32 places from the Triangle, far more than any other carrier.
Airline making headlines across the country
Avelo is an airline in flux. Earlier this year, it announced it would close its base at Hollywood Burbank Airport near Los Angeles and cancel all remaining West Coast flights.
“Despite the investment of significant time, resources and efforts, our West Coast operations have not produced the results necessary to continue our presence there,” the company said in a statement. The company said the aircraft based in California “are expected to support growth in our East Coast bases, where we have significantly more opportunity to continue our path to sustainable cash flow generation.“
Avelo has received criticism for signing a contract with the Department of Homeland Security to operate deportation charter flights for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The flights began last spring from Mesa Gateway Airport outside Phoenix and have prompted protests outside other airports where Avelo does business.
Andrew Levy, the airline’s founder and CEO, said in April that he understood the flights were a “sensitive and complicated topic.” But Levy said the company decided the government charters would help it continue to expand its passenger service and “keep our more than 1,100 crewmembers employed for years to come.”
