New Airline Begins Serving Fresno This Week. Where it's Flying, What it Means for Travelers

Nov. 9—A new airline is entering the Fresno market this week, with ExpressJet Airlines launching its "aha!" leisure brand with service between Fresno Yosemite International Airport and the Reno / Lake Tahoe region.

The first aha! flight to Fresno from Reno-Tahoe International Airport will land about 3:30 p.m. Wednesday, and be greeted with a ceremony by Fresno city leaders. The first flight heading to Reno for its 1 hour 3 minute flight will leave at about 4:15 p.m. Three weekly round trips are scheduled: Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.

The aha! brand (with the lower-case "a" at the beginning and the exclamation point at the end) is an acronym for "air-hotel-adventure." The airline's plan is to sell low-cost packages of flights and hotel stays for vacationers for short, spontaneous getaways or business travelers to the Reno area.

ExpressJet is using Reno as its base of operations for the aha! brand, flying 50-seat Embraer ERJ145 regional jets to small and mid-sized airports in Washington, Oregon and California. Fresno will be the eighth and final city to which aha! is flying in its initial launch of service that began Oct. 24 with flights to Pasco, Washington.

Other airports to which aha! is flying from Reno are Medford/ Ashland, Eugene/ Springfield and Redmond/ Bend in Oregon; and Bakersfield, Ontario, and Eureka/ Arcata in California.

Reno will be a new destination for Fresno air travelers, with the option of a one-hour flight instead of a five- to six-hour drive. ExpressJet CEO Subodh Karnik said the Reno/Tahoe region was selected for to be the base for aha! because it's an alternative to larger, more glitzy Las Vegas, already served from Fresno by two other airlines.

"It's not just casinos and resorts," Karnik said in a telephone interview with The Fresno Bee this week. "It's the lake, it's golfing, it's skiing. It's a four-seasons destination."

"I'm sure the folks in Las Vegas would disagree, but Reno is a much smaller, more compact, friendly and happier place; it's not the madhouse, the mega-destination that Vegas is," he added. "In some ways it's a much more reasonable and convenient destination. It will attract a different crowd."

Karnik also noted the rivalry that exists between Fresno State's Bulldogs athletic teams and the University of Nevada-Reno. "There's an affinity between the two cities," he said. "We hope to capitalize on that."

The aha! plan is to eventually provide vacation package for travelers to book airline flights, hotel rooms and other recreational activities with one visit to the airline's website. "It's a fundamental underpinning of our business model, to just click a button for a package," Karnik said. "We hope to have the ability for Fresnans to say, 'OK, let's go for two days and it's cheap as hell (to book a hotel for a midweek stay); as soon as you walk into the weekend, it becomes a different game."

But ExpressJet and aha! have not yet worked out the kinks in establishing the connections it needs to provide those all-in-one travel packages. "The plan was to have that in November, but we've been delayed," Karnik said. "I hope that we can offer those in late December or early January."

"It's a technical nightmare," he added. "We were a little optimistic in our ability to pull it off."

ExpressJet has operated regional jets, largely under agreements with United Airlines under the United Express brand, for years, but amid the COVID-19 pandemic and schedule uncertainty, that arrangement came to an end in late 2020. ExpressJet recently received clearance from the U.S. Department of Transportation to initiate service as an independent airline.

Karnik said the COVID-19 pandemic that wrought havoc on the entire travel industry last year is now providing opportunities for a smaller airline to enter markets that have been underserved. "We thought we would spend time developing service for cities that lost service in the pandemic," Karnik said.

"Then we started to look at research on travel and realized that everyone is so frustrated with the pandemic that rather than take long trips, people are looking to take familiar trips, two to three days," he added. "The demand and the market for these shorter, more comfortable trips has skyrocketed; that actually made us accelerate our plans."

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