Spirit Airlines set to expand at Orlando airport
Spirit Airlines is expanding service at Orlando International Airport next month after the company has gotten more space to operate here.
Beginning Oct. 7, Spirit is expanding its service by adding seven new routes during a two-month span.
The airline has 12 routes from Orlando, with destinations including San Juan, Puerto Rico, Chicago and Baltimore.
The 19 routes connecting Central Florida to destinations around the country will bring Spirit’s daily departure count to 29, said Paul Berry, the airline’s spokesman.
Berry said the only reason Spirit was able to expand so much at Orlando International is because they secured more gates at the airport.
Ray Anderson, senior director of commercial properties & concessions for the airport, said Spirit leaders requested the additional gates, presenting their expansion plans to airport leaders to justify the request. Neither side disclosed the cost.
Airport leaders have approved a similar request from Southwest and have requests from Frontier and American airlines, said Anderson.
Spirit typically has one gate at other airports, and they had two at Orlando International until that was more than doubled, said Berry. As of Oct. 1, Spirit will have five gates at Orlando International.
“We are all about the efficiency of gate usage,” he said. “Anytime we can get gates, that certainly helps us bring more flights to that city.”
Berry said Spirit’s increase of service at Orlando International is just part of the airline’s larger plans to expand and improve under the guidance of Robert Fornaro, who took the chief executive officer position at the start of the year.
“There’s clearly upward movement in the operation,” he said, adding year-over-year data shows a decrease in the number of complaints filed against the airline.
As he describes it, Spirit is “in the middle of the pack” among airlines in on-time arrival rates.
That’s a shift for the airline that was ranked as one of the three worst airlines for arrivals for 15 consecutive months, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Bureau of Transportation Statistics.
Spirit broke the trend in July by having an on-time arrival rate of 72.77 percent. It had the fifth-best on-time rate of the nine airlines tracked by DOT that operate out of Orlando International.
The newest routes to start locally are connections to Boston and Philadelphia. The rest of the new service schedule is as follows: Oct. 30, Newark, N.J.; Nov. 10, Kansas City and Akron-Canton, Ohio; and Nov. 17, Niagara Falls, N.Y., and Plattsburgh, N.Y.
The New York destinations connect Central Florida to the Canadian border, while allowing travelers to leave the airport before going through customs, said Berry. Orlando International does not currently have service to either upstate New York airport. Allegiant offers service to both airports from Orlando Sanford International Airport.
“More ultra-low fares to Orlando International Airport, the close-to-it-all hub to fun in Central Florida, is great news for cost-conscious travelers,” said Mark Kopczak, Spirit’s vice president of network planning, in a news release.
cdineen@orlandosentinel.com or 407-420-5414