Thursday marks the first flights for a new airline whose name invites puns, whose business plan isn’t mainly to compete with other airlines and whose founder has done it so many times it’s easy to believe it may succeed.
That’s Breeze Airways, founded by David Neeleman, who’s been around at the birth of WestJet, JetBlue and Azul, as well as several years as co-owner of TAP Portugal.
His market plan is to remain flexible, fly where there’s profit and where his airline can make money more easily than others. For now, that’s non-stop connections between pairs of smaller cities that others aren’t serving, using a variety of techniques to keep costs low—a model similar to that of Allegiant. And like Allegiant, he’s very interested in pulling in travelers who would otherwise have driven because of lack of local flights.
But Neeleman feels Breeze has advantages over Allegiant. For a start, the company’s technology is built to handle most ticketing, scheduling and so forth with very small numbers of employees. The initial airfleet of Embraer E190s and E195s were available for leasing at low rates and have wide parts availability; unlike Allegiant and another newcomer, Avelo, both of which fly planes with nearly 200 seats to fill, Breeze’s first fleet holds 108 to 118 passengers and Neeleman believes the airline can break even at 50 to 60 seats sold per flight.
Later in the year, Breeze will start receiving the first of sixty fuel-efficient 160-seat A220s, which will be used for flights beyond two hours. The initial flights will focus on four hubs in the Southeast: Tampa, New Orleans, Charleston and Norfolk, with flights from them to smaller cities.
Are connecting flights in its future, such as Sun Country’s model where nearly all its flights connect in Minneapolis? Neeleman says maybe, maybe not. Since he expects the route map to be quite fluid for a while while Breeze seeks its best market, he’s not willing to rule out connections if they fall into place, but he’s not hunting them either.
