Spirit adding pair of Orlando routes

Airline expecting surge in travel during summer

Spirit Airlines, the number two carrier in Orlando and Las Vegas and the top carrier in Fort Lauderdale, is adding a pair of U.S. destinations with an expectation of an overall surge in travel by summer, according to an airline executive who offered a glimpse of a hoped-for flight path out of the pandemic.

The Florida-based, ultralow cost airline will start daily, nonstop service on May 27 from Louisville’s Muhammad Ali International Airport in Kentucky to Orlando, Fort Lauderdale, Las Vegas and Los Angeles International Airport.

On June 24, Spirit will begin direct flights to Wisconsin’s Milwaukee Mitchell International Airport from Orlando, Las Vegas and Los Angeles International Airport.

“We are starting to see the seeds of coming out of this pandemic,” said John Kirby, Spirit’s vice president of network planning. “Vaccine penetration continues. COVID cases across the nation are really starting to come down. We’ve seen a lot of evidence of pent-up demand and people talk about that a lot when we poll our passengers.”

Projected March activity at Orlando International Airport shows Southwest Airlines as the busiest carrier, with nearly 100 flights daily.

As the second-busiest, Spirit is projected for 58 flights daily, followed by Delta at 54, Frontier at 50 and JetBlue with 39. With the collapse of the nation’s air travel by late spring last year, Spirit was handling daily flights from Orlando numbering in the single digits.

Kirby said travel for leisure, family and friends, which has been driving the industry’s recovery so far, has always been the focus of Spirit. Other airlines more dedicated to business and international travel have had to “scramble’ to revise their route maps to bring in more leisure markets, he said.

“Spirit added fewer markets during the pandemic than any other airline in the U.S.,” Kirby said. “We really focused on bringing our existing network” of routes back.

The airline is now arriving at a growth mode that was in place before the pandemic.

Kirby said the Florida and Las Vegas markets have remained relatively strong during the pandemic, while California, ordinarily a top-five destinations for most cities, was extensively locked down.

He said that prior to the pandemic, the Milwaukee-Los Angeles route had been served by Southwest and the Louisville-Los Angeles route by American. Both of those flights no longer operate and Spirit has stepped in to resume that service.

“With LA, it really is about being opportunistic,” Kirby said.

With its growth mode, Spirit expects to push its flight numbers by summer to more than they were in 2019. To maintain that push, the airline expects to steadily grow its fleet of aircraft, all of which are in the Airbus 320 family.

Spirit ended last year with 157 aircraft, including 30 recalled from desert storage. The inventory is to grow to 173 by the end of this year.