September 14, 2006

Allegiant Air and St Pete's

St. Petersburg, Florida - You’ll soon have some new low cost flights from the St. Peterburg-Clearwater international airport. Starting November 16th, you’ll be able to fly non-stop to 12 cities in the mid-west and eastern United States on Allegiant Air. Las Vegas- based Allegiant is making the St. Petersburg-Clearwater airport one of its focus destinations. Las Vegas, and Sanford/Orlando are the airline’s other two focus destinations.

It’s good news for an underserved airport that needs a new airline. The St. Petersburg-Clearwater International Airport had a record 1.33 million passengers in 2004, but that dropped to 600,000 passengers in 2005 after three airlines left in nine months. Maury Gallagher, Allegiant Air President/CEO: “We’re going to customers that are probably not coming to your area because fare does that. It’s a well proven fact in our business if you lower fares, people will travel.” Introductory fares the next three weeks are $59-dollars one way. Fares will range from $79 to $239 after that.

Allegiant Air will fly from St. Peterburg-Clearwater to Allentown, Lansing, Peoria and Rockford.
The airline is announcing four more destinations Thursday and four more by the end of this month

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Gallagher has it right. Airfares are a textbook example of price elasticity. Check your Econ 101 text.

E.g. If you drop prices by 10% demand will increase by more than 10%

Anonymous said...

I saw the PIE Route Map on a video report down there. I see about 7 TOTALLY NEW Cities soon to be added... not all to PIE; maybe some to SFB.

I can say it looks like Erie and Lexington will be on there.

Still HOPING YNG gets PIE

Bill Randell said...

I can not tell you how bummed out that I am to read these stories. ORH should be riding on Allegaint success, but instead we are on the sidelines watching waiting for consultants.

Anonymous said...

It's to bad to see Allegiant adding all these new cities and especially St Pete's. How much of a poisitive spin could have it been to announce another destination out of ORH. Instead we are back to being one of the biggest cities in the US without a commercial carrier.

Oh well, what can we do.

Anonymous said...

Well, what we should do is. Damn up between the seven hills and fill it with water. But, the key part is make sure we leave all the city officials and employees in it. Just think of how many water problems this solve if we had another Quabbin.