Avelo opened its Tweed New Haven base, its second after Burbank, last November, with highly obvious sun routes to Florida. And now, half a year later, it is about to introduce its first non-Florida services, with the first four to take off this week.
Six months at New Haven
Avelo is New Haven's only scheduled passenger airline, following the end of American to Philadelphia in September.
This week, Avelo will introduce brand-new routes to Charleston (starting May 5th), Myrtle Beach (5th), Nashville (6th), and Savannah (6th). They'll be joined by Baltimore, Chicago Midway, Raleigh Durham, and Wilmington in the coming weeks.
It has five 147-seat B737-700s stationed at the Connecticut airport, renowned for its short runway of just 5,600 feet (1,707 meters), to support this and other coming routes. They're registered N701VL, N702VL, N703VL, N707VL, and N7834A. The most recent arrival was N707VL, which positioned empty from Burbank on May 4th.
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Initial performance?
Speaking of the half-year milestone, Andrew Levy, Avelo's Chairman and CEO, said: "Today we are celebrating Avelo’s first six months of flying at Tweed and the new era of convenience, choice, and affordability in air travel now available to Southern Connecticut."
We should always be wary of what press releases say and always try to read between the lines. However, Avelo at New Haven is a pretty easy proposition to sell – fly locally, fly conveniently, fly easily, and fly cheaper – and it does seem popular.
While traffic figures aren't yet available to me beyond February, a combination of T-100 and booking data shows the following estimated passenger loads and seat load factors.
We should consider fares and ancillaries for a fairer and better picture, but these aren't yet available. As shown in the figure below, December and January both saw additional routes launched, which helps explain the rise in traffic beyond existing route growth.
- November: 15,317 roundtrip passengers (80.2%)
- December: 25,487 (82.0%)
- January: 30,989 (80.0%)
- February: 28,980 (82.0%)
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14 HVN routes this summer
Cirium shows that Avelo has almost 66,000 roundtrip seats for sale at New Haven this May. That's 61% more than in April, with 24,990 more to sell. It corresponds to 13 routes, more than double the number in April. It will have over 109,000 seats across 14 routes by July unless more are announced.
Its network in mid-July will be as follows, with 87 weekly departures or about 12 daily. Assuming five based aircraft, that's an average of five sectors per aircraft per day.
- Orlando: 2x daily
- Myrtle Beach: 8x weekly (2x daily on Saturdays)
- Fort Lauderdale: 1x daily
- West Palm Beach: 1x daily
- Fort Myers: 1x daily
- Baltimore: 6x weekly
- Chicago Midway: 6x weekly
- Raleigh Durham: 6x weekly
- Tampa: 6x weekly
- Savannah: 5x weekly
- Nashville: 4x weekly
- Charleston: 4x weekly
- Sarasota: 4x weekly
- Wilmington: 3x weekly
Have you flown Avelo yet? If so, share your experiences in the comments.