Avelo Airlines boosts its East Coast base with 3 new cities

Avelo Airlines is spreading its wings at its new East Coast base.

The new startup carrier is adding three routes from its hub in New Haven, Connecticut (HVN), giving flyers traveling to or from southern Connecticut a total of 13 destinations served from the city's Tweed airport.

The three new destinations are:

• Baltimore-Washington (BWI).
• Chicago Midway (MDW).
• Raleigh-Durham (RDU).

Avelo will commence service in all three markets on May 26, with flights initially scheduled to operate five times a week (all days except for Wednesday and Saturday).

As with its 10 other routes from New Haven, Avelo will deploy a 146-seat Boeing 737-700 jet for the new flights.

Along with the route announcement, Avelo is celebrating a big milestone in its New Haven operations: It has now transported more than 100,000 customers to or from the region.

Avelo's East Coast expansion began on Nov. 3, when it inaugurated its New Haven base with service to Orlando, one of the six destinations in Florida it now serves from the airport.

These Florida routes seemingly made sense for a leisure-focused ultra-low-cost carrier. Throughout the pandemic, we've seen nearly every airline boost service to the Sunshine State. Even as demand lagged in other markets, traffic to Florida was — no pun intended — hot.

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While Avelo started with Florida service, it announced an expansion last month to four more leisure-focused cities: Nashville; Savannah, Georgia; Myrtle Beach, South Carolina; and Charleston, South Carolina.

While these new destinations aren't in Florida, they still share many of the same characteristics as the Florida routes: They are popular year-round escapes that have proven especially resilient during the demand downturn associated with the pandemic.

But now, Avelo is seemingly charting a new path to growth from New Haven with its latest three routes. While there's undoubtedly a leisure play in all three markets, the cities are also quite popular with business travelers. The airline likely believes that there's demand — especially mid-week — from business travelers traveling between Connecticut and Baltimore, Chicago and Raleigh-Durham.

"We believe these three new destinations will be a big hit with leisure and business travelers alike," Avelo CEO Andrew Levy said in a statement.

While Avelo will continue to hold a monopoly on all of its New Haven routes — no other airline currently flies to the Tweed airport — Avelo's new routes will go head-to-head against Southwest and Frontier, both of which operate from the nearby Bradley International Airport (BDL) that serves Connecticut's capital of Hartford.

Southwest flies between Bradley and both Baltimore and Chicago, while Frontier operates between Bradley and Raleigh-Durham, Cirium schedules show.

That said, Avelo believes that New Haven is a distinct market from Bradley, both for locals living in the area and for those nearby for whom Bradley may be a bit too far.

"The 100,000-customer milestone we achieved in four short months exemplifies the enormous amount of travel Avelo is inspiring in Connecticut. It's abundantly clear that Tweed's unmatched convenience is making travel easier, smoother and more affordable than ever before," said Levy.