Despite Allegiant Air’s record-breaking June at Northwest Arkansas National Airport, the airport’s overall number of passengers decreased when compared to the previous month.
It’s the first time in XNA’s history that June had fewer passengers than May. In all, 83,072 people boarded flights, trailing May by 152.
American Airlines, Delta Air Lines, Frontier Airlines and Breeze Airways experienced decreases when compared to May, but that wasn’t the case for high-flying Allegiant.
Allegiant’s surge
The Las Vegas-based airline, which first offered service at XNA in 2009, had a fabulous June at the airport. It boarded 14,947 people, carrying 3,000 more passengers than it did in May and accounting for 18% of all XNA travelers. It’s never had so many passengers in a single month.
Allegiant has made massive expansions to its XNA offering over the years. It started out with Los Angeles service and within months had added Las Vegas and Orlando/Sanford to its nonstop options. It’s consistently added nonstops to new places since that time such as Destin, Nashville and Phoenix/Mesa. Its newest nonstops go twice a week to three Florida airports: Fort Lauderdale, St. Pete/Clearwater and Punta Gorda. Fort Lauderdale and St. Pete/Clearwater appear to be doing exceedingly well.
Not every Allegiant route has performed so well. Its routes to Houston Hobby and Austin, which both started last year, are no longer among Allegiant’s XNA offerings.
June’s decline
Delta, Frontier and Breeze faced challenges or made changes in their services that led to fewer passengers in June.
Breeze Airways, for example, started flying from XNA to New Orleans last summer, but it paused that service a few weeks ago. The airline plans to restart it on Oct. 7.
Frontier saw a decrease of about 500 passengers in June when compared to May. Most of that can be explained by a small decrease in its number of departures from XNA, 28 in May compared to 26 in June.
Delta, meanwhile, flew seven fewer times in June.
American’s decrease from May was small, seeing 191 fewer passengers last month. It’s remained XNA’s busiest airline every single month since the airport opened in 1998. It carried 37,715 passengers in June, 45.4% of all XNA travelers.
