Allegiant Air travel tips

Good morning from Skift. It’s Friday, September 15. Here’s what you need to know about the business of travel today.

Pre-pandemic, ultra-low-cost carriers were among the most profitable in the industry. Four years later, a big question in the industry seems to be: Can ultra-low-cost carriers survive?. There’s been rampant speculation that Spirit Airlines may file for bankruptcy. Frontier Airlines has fared better, but it’s also reported underwhelming results. 

Greg Anderson is the new CEO of the Allegiant Travel Company. The organization, best known for operating low-cost leisure carrier Allegiant Air, confirmed the news in a market filing on Thursday morning.

Avelo Airlines has unveiled three new routes which will see the budget carrier double down on one of its crew bases and add a new destination to its route map.

Former Allegiant Air CEO Maurice Gallagher is returning to the top job at the budget airline following the sudden departure of CEO John Redmond.

Although the U.S. airlines are continuing to make progress in their recovery from the pandemic, the industry is grappling with an ongoing pilot shortage. And it may only get worse in the next decade.

When an airline knows its core customers are anything but frequent flyers, is there any point in hosting a loyalty program? Probably not. Which explains why Allegiant, the low-cost leisure-focused carrier based in Las Vegas, never rolled out a full-fledged frequent-flyer scheme. There’s just no return-on-investment when your customers are by definition infrequent flyers.

The last of Allegiant Air’s aging fleet of MD-80 planes took its final flight this week, hopefully putting an end to years of safety and reliability concerns swirling around the carrier’s use of an outdated aircraft. Early MD-80 models debuted about 40 years ago, and have been since retired by most other airlines.

Have you questioned flying Southwest since its deadly engine failure made headlines this spring? The incident might have overshadowed a watershed safety moment for another low-cost airline—one that’s long faced questions about its safety: Allegiant Air.