Avelo Airlines swooped into town because Wilmington looked like a good coastal gamble.

An ultra-low-cost carrier hatched in 2018 in Texas, Avelo launched its first-ever flight in 2021 in California, taking off from Wilmington International Airport (ILM) for the first time in June 2022.

Low-cost carriers have been around for decades. According to multiple economic analyses, airline industry deregulation accelerated the trend and led to widespread growth from 1990 to 2020.

Avelo was the first discount carrier to give ILM a shot.

“A couple of years ago, as we were evaluating future opportunities from our (New Haven, Connecticut) base, we had added many of the large Florida cities already, and so we were looking to expand into non-Florida markets,” said Trevor Yealy, Avelo’s head of commercial. “The usual suspects come to mind – Myrtle Beach and Charleston and Nashville and Chicago – places like that. But we received some interesting data on both population growth in Wilmington, as well as second homeownership in Wilmington that seemed to indicate that, hey, there’s an opportunity here that you know others might not be as focused on.”

Initially, some might have viewed Avelo’s Wilmington flight path skeptically. But “it’s been a tremendous market for us, and we’ve grown it from what was originally just New Haven to anywhere from six to eight cities from Wilmington during different points of the year. It’s been a very good station for us piggybacking off that local growth, population growth in and around Wilmington itself, as well as second-home ownership and higher and higher visitation.”

Sun Country Airlines, which started in Minneapolis in 1982, soon followed Avelo into the Port City. Sun Country’s first flight at ILM took place in June 2023.

“We’re continuously looking at what markets are successful for us, where our customers may want to go from Minneapolis-St. Paul,” said Wendy Burt, Sun Country’s senior director of communications. “And we know our customers quite well because they are really vacation and leisure travelers. In the winter, our travelers like to head south and go to warm-weather destinations. In the summer, we fly many more routes that are kind of east to west.”

Sun Country had been serving other East Coast destinations at or near the beach, including Savannah, Charleston and Myrtle Beach, and “those have been very popular destinations,” Burt said. “So, this was another beachy destination that appeals to our customers.”
 

PRICE POINTS

Over the past 10 to 15 years, about 80% of the domestic flight seats have belonged to four airlines – American, Delta, United and Southwest, Yealy said.

“These airlines have gotten bigger and bigger, and costs have grown higher and higher, and they’ve got to figure out how to manage their cost structures,” he said. “What it’s ultimately led to is a reduction in service in a number of places across the country, and what that’s opened up are opportunities for low-cost airlines and ultra-low-cost airlines like ourselves and Sun Country and Allegiant and Spirit and Frontier to start entering more markets.”

A check of ticket prices in September showed one adult would have to pay $558 to American Airlines for a round-trip ticket to Hartford, Connecticut, if traveling Sept. 14-17. An Avelo flight to Hartford using the same scenario cost $56, not including baggage fees and the price of choosing one’s seat.

Breeze Airways will become ILM’s third discount carrier in 2025.

Breeze is scheduled to begin offering four nonstop routes at ILM in February, officials announced in August. The destinations routes connect to Hartford, Connecticut; Orlando, Florida; Fort Myers, Florida; and Providence, Rhode Island.

Entrepreneur David Neeleman (also the founder of JetBlue Airways) started Breeze Airways, headquartered in Cottonwood Heights, Utah, in 2021. According to its website, Breeze operates a fleet of Airbus A220-300 aircraft “with a focus on providing efficient and affordable flights between secondary airports, bypassing hubs for shorter travel times.”

“We’ve had a lot of success in the Carolinas, both North and South Carolina,” said Max Barrus, vice president of planning and revenue for Breeze Airways. “One of our first cities was Charleston, South Carolina, and we’ve seen tremendous growth.”

Barrus said Breeze started service in New Bern a few months ago. “That’s gone really well. We have also expanded service to Raleigh tremendously since we started operating there (in 2023) and seen a ton of success there, so we’re really excited to be able to expand and grow.”

He said Breeze officials see “a lot of unserved markets for Wilmington that we’re really interested in.”

Breeze has three of the same destinations from ILM as Avelo Airlines. Avelo, which already had an existing Orlando route, announced July 24 that it would launch nonstop flights from Wilmington to Fort Myers and Hartford.

Marking its second anniversary at ILM in June, Avelo announced in a news release that it has “achieved industry-leading reliability at ILM. When excluding weather-related cancellations outside Avelo’s control, the airline achieved a 99.3% completion rate, meaning the airline canceled less than 0.7% of flights at ILM since fruition.”
 

CATCHING AIR

The goal of attracting a low-cost carrier to ILM fueled Jeff Bourk’s desire to take the job as airport director in 2022.

“We didn’t have a low-cost carrier here before I started … I started making phone calls before I even took the job to find out if airlines like Sun Country and Avelo and Breeze and others would be interested in this market,” Bourk said.

He said during his own research, he “saw that there was definitely the data to support it. Erin has been working on it as well, and certainly we knew that there was a demand and a market for it,” he said, referring to Erin McNally, ILM’s marketing, air service development and PR manager.

Incentives also play a part.

“We also started right away working on putting together incentive packages with our community partners, like the (Wilmington and Beaches Convention and Visitors Bureau) to be able to help with destination marketing when the new carrier comes in,” Bourk said.

Agencies and New Hanover County kick in funds to entice new carriers.

Bourk, McNally and other ILM employees working on air service development aim “to put together the best business case that we can to get them to put that asset here instead of somewhere else … We work to tell them the reason why this market is better than another market,” Bourk said, adding, “And there’s all kinds of reasons, right? Wilmington is one of the fastest-growing places in general. We have been No. 1 for inbound moves year after year. We have a strong business community. We have a relatively high income per capita, so people have disposable income to travel. All of those types of things are things that we put on the table for the airlines to digest.”

ILM officials also touch base with the airport’s legacy carriers – United, Delta and American Airlines.

“That’s part of air service development, too, is to meet with them to look at where the best opportunities are for them to grow and try to convince them of that as well,” Bourk said. “And there are several examples of that in the last few years as well (including) Delta to Minneapolis, American to Miami, Delta to Boston.”

New flights spring from which areas have the most business and leisure ties to Wilmington. Although a traveler can get there from here, Bourk said Denver is one example of a top unserved market.

“What that means is we have more people from our area going to Denver than most other places right now with our existing air service. We have service to Denver every day, but you have to make a connection through Atlanta or through Charlotte or through Philly or some other city,” he said.

But the demand exists for a nonstop route, he said. If ILM gained that route, “demand would go up, and fares may come down,” Bourk said.
Officials with discount carriers have open minds about whether or not they might offer even more destinations from ILM.

In the two years since Avelo began servicing ILM, the airline’s growth in Wilmington, North Carolina, has been “pretty remarkable,” Yealy said.

That could mean additional flights for ILM.

“As long as it continues performing and customers continue showing up for it, we’re always looking for opportunities to do more everywhere,” Yealy said. “Wilmington is no exception to that.”