If you want to make a wintertime trip to just one of the Northwest Arkansas National Airport’s new nonstop destinations, you’d provide the most regional benefit by waiting until February and flying Delta Air Lines to Salt Lake City.
While Delta’s new service to Detroit (which starts Monday) and the American Airlines’ flights to Philadelphia (beginning Dec. 19) are helpful additions, neither can touch Salt Lake City in terms of importance.
What makes Salt Lake City stand out? It’s all about increasing westbound options for NWA travelers.
With 25 nonstop destinations, XNA’s map is full of great places to go, but there are far more flights going north, south and east than there are going west.
Among those 25 destinations, not all of them have daily service. In fact, 12 are daily destinations, and only three of the 12 (Denver, Phoenix and Los Angeles) are westbound dailies.
The new Salt Lake route’s most important attribute is the fact that it’s going to the west, but it sure doesn’t hurt that it’s on Delta, recognized in the Oct. 1 edition of Conde Nast Traveler as the nation’s best airline. United Airlines was No. 7, ahead of American (No. 8), Allegiant Air (No. 9) and Frontier Airlines (No. 10).
Nonstop saves real time
Let’s be candid: Going west on Delta from XNA is less than ideal right now.
A passenger who wants to use Delta to get to Salt Lake must make a connection at one of its hubs, likely to be either Minneapolis/St. Paul or Atlanta. Even with that travel-in-the-wrong-direction component, data kept by an XNA consultant shows Delta does carry three of the 23 people a day who travel from XNA to Salt Lake City.
Those three people give up real time to be on Delta, too. FareFlightNWA checked the connecting flights from XNA to Salt Lake on Nov. 19, 20 and 21. Currently, Delta travelers to Salt Lake from XNA lose significant time due to layovers, taking six to seven hours for what will soon be a quick, three-hour nonstop flight. It’s simply not possible to leave XNA early and be in Salt Lake by lunchtime on Delta. It doesn’t matter whether the connection is in Minneapolis or Atlanta.
The same trip on United takes about five hours going through Denver, and American can get a traveler to Salt Lake City in five to 5.5 hours by connecting at Dallas/Fort Worth.
With Delta capturing only three passengers a day who are headed to Salt Lake, it’ll be interesting to see how many of the other 20 passengers going there on other airlines choose the Delta nonstop.
Just as importantly, it’s probable that XNA loses some of its Salt Lake passengers to Tulsa International Airport because Delta flies to SLC nonstop from there. It’s a 100-mile drive. With the Delta flight starting at XNA, the incentive to make the drive to Tulsa goes away.
Keeping passengers from making the drive to Tulsa and other airports is a focus of FareFlightNWA as each person who travels from XNA creates an economic benefit to the region.
That benefit — paying for airfare and parking, buying food and drinks at XNA — is creating jobs in Arkansas. The person who drives to Tulsa isn’t harming Northwest Arkansas, but the economic benefit is captured in Tulsa.
Nonstops increase travel
It’s normal for new nonstop flights to increase travel to a destination, and XNA passengers keep proving they’ll pay to be on a nonstop.
Tampa, in fact, saw a massive increase in travel to the Florida city after Breeze Airways and Allegiant Air started flying there. There were fewer than 20 people a day going to Tampa in 2019, but it’s about 86 a day now because Allegiant and Breeze are nonstop options.
American Airlines route planners, meanwhile, had serious doubts about whether passengers would fill up a once-a-day nonstop to Phoenix that started in 2023. XNA administrators for years had encouraged American to try the Phoenix route to no avail.
What American found out quickly after it started flying to the desert city is that the route is a rousing success, so much so that the airline now flies XNA to Phoenix twice a day most of the time.
It’s probable that the successes experienced by Breeze, Allegiant and American in going to Tampa and Phoenix coupled with XNA’s overall performance this year led Delta to give a Salt Lake City flight a shot. Now, it’s up to Northwest Arkansas travelers to keep the route as busy as possible by using it come February.
