The Denver-based Frontier Airlines took an unprecedented step Tuesday toward making Orlando its busiest city this year by announcing nine new domestic and eight new international routes.
Airlines typically unveil with fanfare the start of several or even just one new destination from Orlando International Airport, which is undergoing a surprising recovery from the collapse in travel because of the pandemic.
“I have to say in my 27 years at the airport, there has never been an airline that has made an air-service development announcement of this magnitude,” said Vicki Jaramillo, the airport’s senior director for marketing and recruitment of airline service.
Frontier’s rollout of the new flights will span from late October through December, bringing its total destinations from Orlando to 80, with 15 of those to foreign cities.
The new destinations include Pensacola; Sioux Falls, South Dakota; Fargo, North Dakota; Nassau, Bahamas; and the small city of Liberia, Costa Rica.
“No other airline offers more international nonstop destinations from Orlando than Frontier,” said Daniel Shurz, a Frontier senior vice president. “More total destinations, more domestic nonstop destinations than any other airline and more international destinations than any other airline.”
Also expanding rapidly at Orlando is South Florida-based Spirit Airlines. It is ramping up to 81 daily departures that serve 51 U.S. and international cities.
Frontier, with the start of the flights it announced Tuesday, will have 65 daily departures to its 80 cities.
Both Spirit and Frontier have crew bases at Orlando International Airport, with Spirit having more than 1,200 employees and Frontier having more than 1,000 employees supporting operations in Orlando. The two airlines are pursuing different strategies in schedules and destinations.
Frontier departs to its cities from at least once weekly to multiple times daily.
“We think the right approach is to look at destinations and look at the amount of demand and figure out the right amount of frequency,” Shurz said. “If you are not willing to fly fewer frequencies, you will just have fewer markets that work.”
Spirit provides once-daily to several departures daily to its destinations, seeking to draw passengers by offering schedule flexibility.
Combined, the two ultra-low carriers are dominating Orlando’s airport. Spirit provides more outbound seats each day than Frontier. But together, they offer more service than the largest carrier at Orlando International Airport, Southwest Airlines.
Prior to the pandemic, Orlando’s airport had made a priority of recruiting business travelers, premier airlines of other countries and overseas flights.
But the bulk of the pandemic rebound has been fueled by leisure travel for tourism, families and friends, which is the focus of Frontier and Spirit.
“We are running on a daily basis about 90 percent of where we were pre-COVID,” said Phil Brown, chief executive officer of the Greater Orlando Aviation Authority, which owns and operates the airport. “On the weekends we are running over where we were in 2019.”
Brown said the recovery is occurring more rapidly than the authority had forecasted and is trending toward volumes of passengers that will exceed the capacity for airport parking, terminal space and slots for aircraft.
The airport was overcrowded through 2019 when it was handling more than 50 million passengers annually, as Florida’s busiest and the nation’s 10th busiest airport.
Construction of a $3 billion terminal about a mile south of the original terminal is slated for completion next year to provide crowding relief.
“All of us have read the headlines and we’ve seen the reports on the resurgence of the Delta variant,” Brown said. “There could be some slowdown, but, at this point and continuing on the trajectory we are on now, we will need the south terminal.”
