EVANSVILLE — Bob Whitmer was ecstatic his hard work had paid off.
It was 2011, and he had just shepherded through a runway extension and other improvements at Owensboro’s airport.
Representatives of the low-cost carrier Allegiant were flying into town to tell Whitmer, the airport director, that Owensboro had landed flights to Las Vegas.
“This is a dream come true for Owensboro!” he gushed in a news release touting the service’s launch alongside existing flights to the Orlando area.
But six months later, amid prohibitive fuel costs, that dream ended when Allegiant announced it was pulling its Las Vegas route.
As Evansville celebrates the arrival — and rapid expansion — of Allegiant service, words of caution abound that the routes may be short-lived. Perhaps no entity is more honest about that than Allegiant itself. The airline’s rallying cry to the communities it serves: Use it or lose it.
“Allegiant’s pretty agile,” said Kristen Schilling-Gonzales, the airline’s director of planning. “We’re monitoring every flight. We’re looking at every route we operate on a monthly basis, quarterly basis, even more than that.”
Allegiant is unique in that even seemingly successful service sometimes finds itself on the chopping block.
That's because Allegiant's low-cost fares are dependent upon its ability to up-sell customers on everything from seat selection to hotel rooms. Jets full of frugal passengers who paid for their flights, but nothing else, end up costing the airline money.
In regulatory filings, the company said it averages expenses of about $100 per passenger per flight, or $200 roundtrip. As an airline that routinely offers roundtrip fares as low as $100 on flights, Allegiant needs to sell customers rental cars and tickets to events to make those routes profitable.
“If you took just our airfares alone, that doesn’t cover our costs. That’s honest,” Schilling-Gonzales said. “So we do offer ancillary products as a way to let customers customize their vacations.”
Et tu, Allegiant?
Few airlines tweak their route maps as frequently as Allegiant. While legacy carriers, such as American, Delta and United, are more apt to play the long game when it comes to allowing new routes to perform, Allegiant opts for a different approach.
Take Owensboro. At one point, Allegiant flew four roundtrip flights per week between Orlando and Owensboro, as well as the twice-weekly Las Vegas flight.
"We were very elated that we had nonstop flights to two of the most popular vacation destinations in the United States," Whitmer said. "It was a very attractive offering we had at our airport. We were extremely pleased."
Today, Allegiant only flies twice-weekly Orlando flights.
While Allegiant still serves Owensboro, there are plenty of other airports — including Casper, Wyoming; Akron-Canton, Ohio; and Youngstown-Warren, Ohio, — where Allegiant has departed completely.
When Allegiant left Casper, "they never issued a news release," Airport Director Glenn Januska said. "They took the service out of the schedule, and I think the only way people would have known that the service was going to be discontinued was they went to book a flight and noticed, 'Hey, wait a minute. Casper isn't there anymore.'"
A similar situation happened at Akron-Canton, where Allegiant also abruptly pulled its flights.
Marketing Director Lisa Dalpiaz said Akron-Canton was "disappointed in Allegiant's decision."
At Youngstown-Warren, which lies between Cleveland and Pittsburgh, Allegiant — in its trademark honesty — "told us, straight up, we can make more money at the larger airports," Aviation Director Dan Dickten said.
Now you see it ...
While some airports grapple with the loss of Allegiant service, the opposite is true in Evansville.
Two years ago, Allegiant didn’t even have Evansville on its route map. Then it added twice-weekly Orlando flights, followed by a third weekly Orlando flight, and then a second destination: Destin, Florida.
How long the good times will roll remains up in the air. For every Casper, Akron or Youngstown there are dozens of airports that 21-year-old Allegiant has served uninterruptedly for a decade or longer.
Allegiant says it's committed to serving both Tri-State airports, even though they're only 25 miles apart.
"There are increased costs by operating both airports, but we think it’s a bigger, larger revenue benefit by serving both airports and passengers in both cities," Schilling-Gonzales said.
Flights to Orlando from Evansville operate on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays, while flights from Owensboro operate on Mondays and Fridays. Some passengers fly from one airport and back to another depending on what best meets their schedule, Schilling-Gonzales said.
But if Youngstown-Warren is any indication of Allegiant's business model, service to Owensboro may not be long for this world.
"We could kind of see the handwriting on the wall," Dickten said. "Our schedule started to change. We lost Punta Gorda back in 2015-2016. Then we started getting some of the schedules that weren't during the prime time — more late in the evening, and this and that."
That's exactly what's happening in Owensboro, which lost its Las Vegas flight, then some of its Orlando flights and then more optimal schedules.
Allegiant's flights from Owensboro often are the last to land at Orlando. Delays regularly push arrival times past midnight.
Allegiant spokeswoman Courtney Goff said the airline is committed to serving both Evansville and Owensboro and splitting airport fees between the two cities.
"In the instance of right now, where we have these two separate airports, we're able to keep the costs as low as we can to passengers," she said. "We could decide something different tomorrow."
The next five years
Allegiant has suffered its fair share of bad publicity for wounds both superficial and self-inflicted.
The airline gained some notoriety when it announced new routes only to pull the service before a single jet took off. That's a practice the airline has stopped.
"We usually extend our schedule four times a year rather than having an ongoing schedule," Schilling-Gonzales said. "When we release that schedule, that's pretty well what we intend to operate at those times. We've been conscientious about putting routes on sales that we were operating at the times, at the days, we said we would. We've gotten a lot better at it over the past couple of years."
More recently, Allegiant saw bookings drop after a "60 Minutes" story about the airline's safety record. However, that story brushed over the fact that Allegiant has markedly improved that record as it aggressively phases out its older, gas-guzzling McDonnell Douglas MD-80s and takes on new Airbus A320s.
With its fleet of about 100 jets — many of them only a few years old — Allegiant constantly surveys markets to see if moving a jet from, say, Owensboro to Evansville will make the company more money.
"We've always known if the market was not doing what they needed from a revenue standpoint that they could take that airplane and put it someplace else where they think they can generate more money," Januska said of the Casper market. "That's a business decision."
And the airline makes no apologies for tinkering with its route map, which for now looks bright for Evansville, if not so much for Owensboro.
"If we're not failing, we're not trying hard enough," Schilling-Gonzales said. "Sometimes, you have to take a chance, and sometimes it doesn't quite work."