Spirit Boosts Orlando Flights, Solidifying No. 2 Spot and Seeing More Growth This Year

Florida’s only major airline, Spirit, this month increased its number of flights at Orlando International Airport, further locking up the carrier’s ranking as second-busiest at the airport and suggesting a trajectory for overtaking Southwest Airlines for the top spot.

“To be fair, our goal is not to be the largest carrier at Orlando International Airport but we think there is a lot of opportunity there and we think it fits our model very well,” said John Kirby, Spirit vice president for network planning. “Whether that culminates in the No. 1 position I think it’s way too early to tell.”

An ultra-low-cost carrier, Spirit is the dominant airline at its home base of Fort Lauderdale–Hollywood International Airport in Broward County, leading JetBlue and Southwest. It is slated to rank later this year as the second-busiest for daily departures from Miami International Airport.

Leaders at Orlando’s airport, the busiest in Florida, have long desired to boost the number of business travelers and flights, and premium international flights to balance the airport’s heavy reliance on tourism.

But after the aviation collapse in 2020 because of the pandemic, the airport has benefited from a surprisingly strong national surge in what the industry calls “leisure” travel for friends, family, relatives and tourism.

During the Christmas season, Orlando’s airport was among the nation’s busiest.

This year’s Independence Day holiday activity at the airport often surpassed volumes on the same days two years ago. Through 2019 and early 2020, the airport ranked as the 10th-busiest in the nation and was handling passengers at a rate of more than 50 million annually, or more than its designed capacity.

During seven days of the 13-day July Fourth holiday stretch — which spanned the last week of June and the first week of July — the airport saw more passengers than on corresponding days in 2019.

The airport measures its activity by the number of passengers passing through security checkpoints. The daily figures for this year’s holiday ranged from 111,000 to 137,000.

However, the daily figures in 2019 were near or above 150,000 on several days. Ultimately, the airport saw 8 percent fewer passengers for the holiday than in 2019.

But volumes still rejuvenated activity at the airport, including at times filling 90 percent of the parking spaces at the airport’s primary garages, A, B and Terminal Top. Those spaces had been left largely abandoned during much of 2020 because of the pandemic.

The Greater Orlando Aviation Authority’s forecast for average daily departures in July showed Southwest with 117, Spirit with 69, American with 51, Delta with 49, Frontier with 49, JetBlue with 43 and United with 33.

But with the month nearly half over, Spirit bumped the July count to 81 daily departures and expects to be at or near 85 by the end of the year.

In Fort Lauderdale, the airline has grown from a peak of about 85 daily departures during the holidays in late 2019, to just over 100 now.

“We are already this month bigger than we have been in the history of Spirit Airlines and we are bigger in Orlando than we have ever been in our history as well and that’s very purposeful,” Kirby said.

He said the load factors, the percentage of filled seats, have rebounded to match those of 2019.

But what hasn’t recovered is the strength of demand, Kirby said.

“I would say that demand arguably isn’t all the way back in that fares aren’t quite where they were pre-pandemic,” he said. “We are stimulating demand with lower fares. We’re trying to get folks comfortable and I think we are accomplishing that.”

He said overall travel numbers remain dampened to varying degrees by the high prices of rental cars, lack of availability of hotel rooms in some markets, various COVID restrictions for international travel and the slow rebound of business travel.

But, said Kirby, “we will be even bigger next year.”

[email protected]