Spirit expands international flights despite uncertainty

International flights to and from Orlando remain in flux with upcoming mandatory COVID-19 testing for passengers traveling to the U.S., Norwegian Air’s demise, the slow pace of vaccinations and President Trump’s lifting of restrictions on non-U.S. citizens arriving from Brazil and much of Europe.

Amid the buffeting, Florida’s Spirit airlines announced Tuesday it is expanding its Caribbean and Latin America routes, expecting that tourism and visiting of family and friends will continue this year to outpace business travel.

Orlando International Airport is Spirit’s second busiest airport after its home airport in Fort Lauderdale. But Spirit provides the most international destinations from Orlando and the airline is about to surpass its pre-pandemic flight volume.

“February 2020 averaged 8.8 departures per day to the Caribbean and Latin America,” said John Kirby, Spirit vice president for network planning. “In February of 2021, we are going to be at 8.3, so we’re down only .5 trips per day. In March, we will actually be up year over year.”

Of the airline’s coming expansion of service, it will start flights to Saint Thomas in the Virgin Islands in February, and to Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic and Port-Au-Prince, Haiti, in March.

Spirit will resume Orlando flights to Aguadilla, Puerto Rico, when the airport there reopens. The airline previously restarted

its Orlando flights to Colombia, Honduras, Mexico, Guatemala and El Salvador last month.

“This has been widely publicized, but where the demand has really been is in leisure and VFR — visiting family and relatives,” Kirby said. His ultra-low cost airline focuses on that market sector.

Southwest, Delta, Spirit, Frontier, JetBlue, American and United, in that order, are the busiest by numbers of flights at Orlando’s airport.

While Orlando International Airport, reported by industry trackers as the nation’s 10th busiest before the pandemic, is clawing back some of its international service, the days of the long-haul jets crowding for afternoon departures by Virgin, British Airways, Emirates, Lufthansa and others remain a scene of the past.

On Monday, Trump rescinded entry bans on non-U.S. citizens from Brazil, the U.K and much of Europe. But officials with incoming President Joe Biden’s administration responded within hours that the bans would remain in place.

The U.K. and Brazil were the largest international markets for Orlando’s airport before the rise of COVID-19.

The prospects for a full, international rebound were dealt a blow when Norwegian Air announced Thursday that it would end its transatlantic flights from Orlando and the U.S. in a bid to recover from bankruptcy.

“Travel restrictions and changing government advice continue to negatively influence demand for long haul travel, and Norwegian’s entire Boeing 787 Dreamliner fleet has been grounded since March 2020,” the airline said in statement. “Under these circumstances, a long-haul operation is not viable for Norwegian and these operations will not continue.” The airline will focus on European routes.

Norwegian wasn’t the busiest provider of European flights from Orlando, which the airline began in 2014, but it scheduled service to Copenhagen, Oslo, Paris, Stockholm and London. That amounted to more nonstop choices for European countries than offered by any other airline at Orlando International Airport.

The airline flew the full-efficient Dreamliner to U.S. destinations, including one other city in Florida, Fort Lauderdale.

Scott Keyes, founder and Chief Flight Expert of Scott’s Cheap Flights, a website service that notifies subscribers of low fares, credits Norwegian with driving down the price of transatlantic flights.

“Before Norwegian, transatlantic flights were quite expensive because they faced no competition from budget airlines,” Keyes said.

Orlando airport director Phil Brown said Norwegian Air’s business model was long questioned for its sustainability. “The long-haul, low-cost model was one that they sort of pioneered,” he said.

“For those of us who didn’t have a lot of money and wanted to travel to Europe, it was a good product,” Brown said, noting Norwegian’s reliance on U.S. flight crews. “It will be missed but the challenges today for international, as well as domestic service, have mounted with this global pandemic.

Brown said Orlando’s airport is contending with a host of unknowns for international travel, including the state of confidence among people so far reluctant to board a plane, the pace of vaccinations, unemployment and the CDC’s order that beginning Jan. 26 passengers departing from any foreign country to the U.S. must provide a negative COVID test before getting on a plane.

While many countries are up to speed with testing, some Latin American nations will have to scramble to provide testing to U.S.bound travelers, Brown said.

Luis Olivero of the Greater Orlando Aviation Authority on Tuesday urged travelers leaving Orlando to research the availability of testing in countries they are visiting “to ensure passengers are able to board their flight to the U.S.”

Spirit’s Kirby said his airline’s website will include details on testing options at the international destinations served by Spirit.

“I think it’s fair to say that some people may say ‘oh boy, another thing that I have to do,’ ” Kirby said. “We also think that people will feel good about getting on a plane, knowing that every single person on that aircraft has tested negative.”