Allegiant Airlines in the New York Times

Very Good piece on Allegiant Airlines, their business plan is worked around using MD80 aircraft, very sound business plan....

These are a couple of things that I found interesting:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/21/busin ... f=business


Even with its huge fuel bills, Allegiant’s costs are about 15 percent lower than Southwest’s.

Cheap planes and a route network that largely avoids head-to-head competition against bigger airlines have made Allegiant steadily profitable since 2003, a rarity in the business.

The market share of low-cost carriers has doubled since 1998, to about 35 percent, and will keep growing as Southwest, JetBlue and others add planes

Joe Leonard, chairman and chief executive of AirTran, which battles Delta in Atlanta, said Allegiant had “a very workable strategy; I think they’ll do well.”


But paying so little for MD-80’s, Allegiant lets other factors dictate its schedule, flying its aircraft about seven hours a day. To keep labor costs down, it typically flies a plane to and from a city that is no more than four hours from Orlando or Las Vegas. That way, only a single shift of workers is required. It tries to have all the planes back each night in Las Vegas and Orlando, where maintenance is centralized.

Mike Boyd had some good things to say about them. Don't expect them to move into the Biz travel market. They've found their nitch as a vacation net new customer airline and it seems to work for them.

They tend to fly some odd city pairs though in my opinion. Ones you would not think to work etc... minus Vegas anyplace.................. Or anyplace Orlando but rock on I talked to a captain once from them while at Sanford they seem to like their company alot.

Yet Spirit ditched the Mad Dogs because they were too expensive. By the way, it's not some miracle of scheduling to send an MD-80 on an 8 hour turn - it can only carry 4 hours of fuel!

Here is their surprising Route Map, pretty amazing how many small markets they serve, although many are not daily. Enjoy!

http://www.allegiantair.com/aaRouteMap.php


Looking at some of the cities they probably fly the largest aircraft to some of those cities on a scheduled basis and often times the only non regional or commuter aircraft scheduled ops.


Cheers

LGA777