For Avelo Airlines, the Wilmington International Airport remains high on the low-cost carrier’s list of success stories.
The airline started flying out of Wilmington in 2022 and launched a hub here in April this year. As of Nov. 26, Avelo served 15 nonstop destinations out of ILM, with more expected in the future.
“We still think that there’s a large untapped opportunity set out of Wilmington, that as we grow as an airline, we want to tap into more,” said Trevor Yealy, Avelo’s head of commercial. “We’re excited about the prospects that remain ahead of us in Wilmington.”
Meanwhile, Avelo has scaled back in Raleigh.
“As Raleigh has been the beneficiary of all this growth, more routes have been served that we would have otherwise considered in the past. And so that’s what makes the growth prospect challenging in Raleigh,” Yealy said. “That’s very different from Wilmington.”
Avelo has been adding flights to ILM, and the only recent reduction Avelo’s ILM routes was the discontinuation of its Houston, Texas, flight on Sept. 27.
“It just didn’t take so we had to reduce that, but otherwise, aside from seasonal adjustments for certain routes … we haven’t made any significant changes (in terms of subtracting flights) at Wilmington, and for the foreseeable future, we don’t envision that,” Yealy said.
Avelo’s ILM hub has two aircraft and employs more than 75 crewmembers, airline officials said at the end of October.
When Avelo announced nearly a year ago that it would establish a hub in Wilmington, ILM director Jeff Bourk said officials had hoped Avelo would open a base here when it first started offering flights in the Port City. “I never could have imagined it would happen as quickly as it has,” Bourk said at the time.
On Nov. 20, Avelo launched a flight from Wilmington to Palm Beach International Airport, the only airline to offer a nonstop flight to West Palm Beach from ILM.
Avelo is also the first and only airline set to offer a direct international flight from Wilmington. Officials in August announced plans to begin flights to Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, starting Dec. 24.
Travelers on the ILM-Punta Cana flight will depart from the main airport terminal. Returning flights will taxi to ILM’s customs building, where passengers will deplane and go through the customs process, Bourk said when the flight was announced.
Avelo communications manager Courtney Goff said at the time of the announcement that the company decided to bring an international flight to ILM because of data showing demand among local travelers.
“We’re seeing a lot of demand (for a flight to) the Dominican Republic from this area,” Goff said. “Punta Cana is kind of an up-and-coming destination.”
The government shutdown, which lasted 43 days beginning Oct. 1 and impacted some major airports, didn’t affect Avelo’s operations much, Yealy said.
“Avelo focuses on secondary, less-busy airports, and because of this, we were minimally impacted during the government shutdown,” he said. “We faced the same ATC staffing and airspace issues as all carriers did. We did not have to lessen capacity anywhere, so ILM flights were business as usual for all Avelo customers.”
In general, some low-cost and ultra-low-cost airlines in the U.S have been struggling more than before the pandemic.
For example, Spirit Airlines filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy this summer for the second time in a year, according to news reports. A CNBC article in October said Spirit won court “approval for a $475 million lifeline and a $150 million payment from its biggest aircraft lessor,” allowing the airline to continue operating.
Yealy said Avelo has posted profitable quarters but has not yet had a full year of profitability. He said the reasons include inflation and consumer credit pressures among lower-income travelers, route overlap among other low-cost carriers, and major carriers using some cheaper seats to compete with low-cost carriers’ prices.
Avelo’s business model aims to help the airline avoid such competition from bigger airlines for cheaper seats.
“We try to find and target those routes that have no existing nonstop service between two airports, but where we know there is demand,” Yealy said.
He said Avelo expects demand for more destinations in the Port City.
“As we get more aircraft in the future, we’ll look at how to best plug them into Wilmington for the unserved opportunity set that still exists out there,” Yealy said. “As I look at a Wilmington, say, compared to its neighbor down the road in Myrtle Beach, there are a lot of cities across the Northeast, Midwest and southern U.S. that don’t have nonstop service to Wilmington, but when you look at migration trends over the last 10 to15, years, there has been a clear pattern of migration from certain cities to Wilmington.”
