Allegiant taking its time to blend leisure airline powerhouses

Allegiant Air executives have a lengthy to-do list ahead of them before they can integrate Minneapolis-based Sun Country Airlines and create what is expected to be a leisure air carrier superpower.

In the meantime, the two airlines will operate separately for as many as 24 months before the carriers are brought together under a single operating certificate.

Kristen Schilling-Gonzales, vice president of planning and revenue for Las Vegas-based Allegiant, said in an exclusive interview with the Review-Journal Thursday, that the integration will provide opportunities for Allegiant to develop international routes to Mexico from Las Vegas.

“It’s an exciting time where we can get up to 200-plus destinations, over 650 combined routes, just as is, and that’s not even including any growth or any opportunities we have moving forward,” she said. “And on the Allegiant side, it adds that we’ve got some international opportunities that maybe we didn’t have before. It helps us to expedite some of those.”

One of the first steps toward integration is that customers will have a seamless experience booking travel online. Allegiant customers seeking flights available on the Sun Country network will automatically be forwarded to the Sun Country website when they attempt to book online. Likewise, Sun Country, which has a loyal following in the Midwest, will get pushed to the Allegiant site if their desired booking is available through Allegiant.

Familiar with Allegiant

Schilling-Gonzales said many Midwesterners have familiarity with the Allegiant brand thanks to the longtime naming rights deal for Allegiant Stadium, the home of the Las Vegas Raiders National Football League team.

While both Allegiant and Sun Country have built profitable leisure airlines for years, only one route, between Appleton, Wisconsin, and Fort Myers, Florida, were common to both carriers.

Because both carriers have been successful and are expected to continue to be, Schilling-Gonzales said there’s no rush toward blending the airlines.

“If you think of it in that way, it’s more of a, ‘Hey, we get to really build what we want with the best attributes of each carrier and with the right talent.’”

She said joint meetings between executives of both carriers have delivered healthy debate about how they should approach the routes they want to serve.

Schilling-Gonzales said the summer travel season is shaping up to be healthy one for Las Vegas after concerns had been raised about soaring fuel prices resulting from the U.S. war with Iran and the blockage of the Strait of Hormuz in the Middle East.

Another piece of the integration strategy, Schilling-Gonzales said, is to determine what customers want and deliver products to match those desires. She said the concept of bundling prices on vacation packages is a strategy that came directly from customer feedback.

Seasonal scheduling

Key to Allegiant’s delivery of products customers want is to fly when customers want to travel — and that means seasonal scheduling. The airline occasionally takes a black eye when seasonal flights go on hiatus and the schedule is interpreted as the abandonment of a route.

That happened recently when the airline confirmed the elimination of 61 routes from its system and said it was consistent with the airline’s longstanding business model and standard operating procedure.

“It’s maybe an opportunity for us to do better on that in the future,” Schilling-Gonzales said.

While many of the routes are temporary seasonal shutdowns, there are occasions when a change is made due to additional costs the airline doesn’t want to pass on to customers. That was the case for when Allegiant bailed out of Los Angeles International Airport in January. The airport embarked on a capital improvement project and began collecting fees that most airlines passed along to passengers on flights through the airport.

Because the price of an average Allegiant ticket would rise by about $50 per ticketed passenger, the airline opted instead to bail out of LAX in favor of serving Southern California from Hollywood Burbank Airport roughly 32 miles away.

“LAX wasn’t the best option for us,” Schilling-Gonzales said. “So instead of Los Angeles, we’re flying to Burbank or Orange County. We work with our marketing teams and try and get the word out. They don’t all work unfortunately.”

She also cited a route between Bangor, Maine, and Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

“Lots of folks want to travel between those places, but more so in the spring. So last year, we tried to extend the season into the summer.

It’s traditionally been a spring route. We added some frequency for the summer last year, and it didn’t quite turn out how we had anticipated. But we’re still going to fly it in the spring.”