Beginning on July 15, the Mexican ultra-low-cost carrier Viva Aerobus will launch five new routes (four domestic, one international) from the Felipe Ángeles International Airport (NLU). These commercial services were announced a day after the Mexican Government met with the airline industry. They agreed to increase the number of daily operations from Mexico City’s new airport. Let’s investigate further.
The new flights
Viva Aerobus currently operates two daily flights from NLU, serving Guadalajara and Monterrey with one flight each. The ultra-low-cost airline is looking to strengthen its connectivity from the Felipe Ángeles airport by launching five additional destinations on July 15.
Viva Aerobus will launch flights to four domestic destinations, Acapulco, Cancún, Oaxaca, and Puerto Escondido, all leisure cities, and one international destination, Havana, Cuba. The flight to Cuba will be the first international service operated by a Mexican carrier from the new airport. Currently, only Venezuela’s Conviasa operates an international flight in NLU, operating a flight from Caracas once a week onboard its Airbus A340 fleet.
Viva Aerobus will employ its Airbus A320 and Airbus A321 fleets to operate these routes. These jetliners have a capacity for 186 and 240 passengers, respectively.
Viva will fly twice a week to Acapulco and Oaxaca; it will operate three weekly flights to Puerto Escondido and daily to Cancún and Havana. Once these five routes are launched, Viva Aerobus will offer 70 operations per week from NLU and 750,000 yearly seats.
Route analysis
The route to Cancún will be contested. Volaris already flies between Felipe Ángeles and Cancún with load factors around 80%, the best among the currently available flights from the new airport. All the other routes will be uncontested for Viva Aerobus from NLU. Nonetheless, these destinations are already being served by Aeromexico, Aeromar, Volaris, and Viva Aerobus itself from the old Mexico City Benito Juárez International (MEX).
Viva Aerobus’ most significant challenge is proving that these routes are commercially viable from Mexico City’s new airport when they are already being served from the old airport.
The old airport is better connected overall to Mexico City and has more flights, meaning more connectivity than NLU. For example, Viva Aerobus currently offers 543 flights from MEX per week, serving 36 destinations, including ten international cities.
Juan Carlos Zuazua, Viva Aerobus’ CEO, said,
“We see an attractive market opportunity to connect Mexico City with touristic and leisure destinations famous domestically and internationally. These new routes will provide more options, at lower prices, so more people can travel from different points in a safe and trustworthy way, onboard Mexico’s most modern aircraft.”
More routes for the new airport?
On Tuesday, the Mexican government announced its plans to increase the number of daily services in the recently inaugurated airport.
The current plan is to have 100 daily operations by the end of this year. The Mexican government will immediately relocate all charter and cargo domestic flights operating at MEX to NLU.
Additionally, Aeromexico, Viva Aerobus, and Volaris have agreed to increase their daily services at the new airport.
Aeromexico expects to have up to 30 daily operations in NLU by August. Nonetheless, the airline has not announced which routes will launch from the Felipe Ángeles International Airport.
Volaris has no current information on which routes will launch from the new airport.
Currently, there is no information regarding any international airline sending a route to the Felipe Ángeles airport. Nonetheless, the Mexican authorities have stated MEX will no longer accept new flights, therefore any new international route not allocated already for the summer season will have to land in NLU.
Would you like to travel onboard Viva Aerobus to one of these new destinations? Let us know in the comments below.