Allegiant Air on Tuesday announced that it’ll start flights to a new destination from Northwest Arkansas National Airport.
The new, twice-a-week flights will take people from XNA to Gulf Shores International Airport. Gulf Shores doesn’t have commercial air service, but Allegiant will kick it off in May 2025 with flights from Northwest Arkansas, Kansas City, Houston and three other cities.
It’s common for Northwest Arkansas families in the summertime to make the 11-hour drive each way to the Alabama coast, visiting cities such as Gulf Shores and Orange Beach. The flight from XNA will take less than two hours.
The Alabama airport’s leadership in mid-2023 announced that it would be building a terminal for commercial service, predicting it would be ready to go sometime in 2025. The airport received a $5 million federal grant for the project earlier this year.
“We have a lot of interest from a lot of airlines basically due to the fact that we have 8 million visitors a year coming in here and a vast majority of those would rather fly,” said now-retired Gulf Shores Airport Director Scott Fuller in 2023. “The problem is that we don’t have a terminal, so we don’t have a place to put them.”
For Northwest Arkansas, the first commercial flight bound for Gulf Shores leaves XNA on May 22. It’ll depart every Thursday and Sunday.
Gulf Shores is Allegiant’s ninth nonstop destination from the Arkansas airport, and some of the nine routes such as Phoenix and St. Petersburg/Clearwater operate for only a few months each year.
American Airlines and Delta Air Lines, two of XNA’s three legacy carriers, have made new service announcements in the second half of this year with nonstops coming online to Detroit, Philadelphia and Salt Lake City. However, the airport’s low-cost carriers have been mostly silent for more than a year. The last new route started by a low-cost carrier came in early 2023 via Breeze Airways flights to Orlando and Phoenix. Only the twice-a-week Orlando flights continue to be offered.
Allegiant remains the biggest of the airport’s low-cost airlines, carrying about 11% of all its travelers. Among the airline’s destinations are Las Vegas, Orlando/Sanford, Destin, Fort Lauderdale and Nashville.
