Budget carrier Allegiant Air ready for blockbuster growth — except for that Florida resort
Allegiant Air says it's going "back to its roots" in 2025 with new jets, new routes and more to come this year.
Part of that evolution means the potential end of its foray into the hotel business.
This week, the company announced it is seeking investors or buyers for its Las Vegas-style Sunseeker Resort near Punta Gorda, Florida — a sprawling property on Charlotte Harbor the company once saw as a destination for passengers it could funnel through its extensive route network into Punta Gorda Airport (PGD), about a half-hour north of Fort Myers.
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But early struggles for the resort since opening its doors in late 2023 — and a re-focusing by Allegiant on its core airline business — could see the airline's hotel venture end up a short-lived gamble.
"Underlying our execution is the deliberate efforts of being laser-focused on our core strength: the airline," Allegiant CEO Greg Anderson, who assumed his post last summer, said this week on the company's latest earnings call.
Major growth in 2025
Despite Allegiant's plans to offload Sunseeker, the company is poised for major growth in 2025.
A whopping 44 new routes announced in a November announcement — tied for the biggest expansion in its history — will launch in the coming months.
And that may be just the beginning.
For years, a labor shortage and aircraft delivery delays at Boeing hindered Allegiant's hopes to grow its route map — a network long known for flights that connect underserved U.S. cities with popular leisure destinations.
But after many months of slashing routes and waiting on the jets it would need to enter a true growth spurt, the company hit a major tipping point late last year.
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"A lot of this is in the rearview," Allegiant chief commercial officer Drew Wells declared at an industry conference in November.
New 737 MAX deliveries key to growth
Over the final few months of 2024, the carrier took delivery of the first four of its long-awaited Boeing MAX 8-200 aircraft — the 190-seat jet it sees as a linchpin of its future plans.
Allegiant is scheduled to take delivery of up to 13 more MAX jets over the course of 2025, a spokesperson told TPG.
With staffing and other infrastructure already in place to support a larger airline, Wells said, the addition of new aircraft was akin to flipping a light switch — and the proof is in the numbers.
In October, Allegiant flew less than it did the prior year, according to aviation analytics firim Cirium. The same was true for November.
But in December, its total number of seats flown skyrocketed, 14% over 2023 levels.
December wasn't an anomaly. Over the first six months of 2025, the airline's total seats flown is scheduled to be up 16% over this time last year, per Cirium.
What's more, jets featuring the carrier's extra-legroom "Allegiant Extra" seats fly on five times as many departures during the first quarter of 2025 versus the first three months of last year, the company shared this week.
That means the carrier will be better positioned to capture the strong interest travelers have in premium seats with extra space — a trend that's led a slew of low-cost airlines to announce new higher-end seating and product offerings in recent months.
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Additional routes expected
And then there's the matter of where Allegiant flies: Expect the company to announce more new routes in 2025, Wells told analysts this week.
"The planning team is ecstatic to have some flexibility and freedom," he said while touting the dozens of new flights the carrier will launch over the next few months.
That includes the half dozen cities that will soon be linked by Allegiant to Gulf Shores International Airport (GUF) on Alabama's Gulf Coast, where it will soon become the only airline at that coastal airport.
"We've heard from our customers that they travel to the Alabama coast for an annual vacation, but currently drive as much as 15 hours each way," Wells said this week. "This looks a lot like prior Allegiant success stories like Punta Gorda, or Destin, Florida."
Similar to Gulf Shores, Punta Gorda had little meaningful commercial airline service when Allegiant began flying there in 2009. The airline leveraged its position there for a torrid expansion, today flying to about 50 destinations from the secondary airport in the Fort Myers metro area.
Only one other airline, Sun Country Airlines, flies from the airport, offering seasonal service to its Minneapolis hub in a route it added only as part of an apparent turf war with Allegiant.
Budget carrier turf war? Sun Country appears to retaliate against Allegiant
Regardless, Punta Gorda is where Allegiant will again have a large presence in 2025, with dozens of nonstop routes but, it hopes, no hotel venture in the near future.
The company hopes to offload the Sunseeker property by summer, executives said Tuesday — and have fielded interest both from potential buyers and companies behind the major hotel loyalty programs.
Suffice it to say, 2025 will be a year of major evolution for the airline.
"I don't view it so much as change, as coming back to our roots," Wells said in November while speaking at the Skift Aviation Forum in Dallas. "Kind of returning that focus to what made us great is where we want to go."
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