Nature hates a vacuum. So as the merger of Southwest and AirTran leaves behind a few holes in service at smaller airports, Las Vegas-based Allegiant Air is stepping up to fill them.
Allegiant is expanding to 10 East Coast cities, including some traditional Southwest ones on the outskirts of the biggest cities, offering flights as well as commissionable vacation packages to places like Florida and Vegas.
Among the new airports are Long Island MacArthur Airport, in Islip, N.Y., and Stewart International Airport, in New Windsor, N.Y., on the edges of the lucrative New York market, and Portsmouth, N.H., north of Boston.
In keeping with Allegiant’s leisure model, most of the flights will be to Florida.
Allegiant is adding seven new 177-seat Airbus A320s to handle the new traffic.
The other new cities are: Charlottesville, Virginia.; Clarksburg, West Virginia.; Concord, North Carolina; Manhattan, Kansas; Oklahoma City and Tulsa, Oklahoma; and Syracuse, New York.
The low-cost carrier is kicking off the routes with rock-bottom fares, as low as $99 round-trip to Florida.
Its business model is to offer rock-bottom fares and then aggressively sell vacation packages, on which it pays commission to travel agents registered in its program.
For details, go to .https://www.allegiantair.com/aaTravelAgentLogin.php.
