Skift Take
Serial airline entrepreneur David Neeleman's new venture Breeze Airways takes off next week. While it may not yet be the Amazon or Uber of airlines, Neeleman is confident in its prospects tapping some of American's pent-up travel demand.
David Neeleman was recently in Huntsville, Alabama, for family reasons. His mother-in-law had passed away. But while there he saw a growing, lively city with people who wanted to travel but, after all of the airline consolidation of the past decade, could not easily do so without a connection at a major airport like Atlanta.
So what does a serial airline entrepreneur do? Adds Huntsville to the list of initial destinations for his latest venture, Breeze Airways.
Breeze will take off from Tampa on May 27 with plans to initially serve 16 destinations, most east of the Mississippi River. The carrier is Neeleman’s fifth after Azul in Brazil, JetBlue Airways, WestJet in Canada, and Morris Air. If there is someone who could launch an all new airline during the worst crisis the industry has ever faced, it’s Neeleman.
“Obviously we've been through a tough year, [what] with Covid and the industry has been particularly hard hit,” Neeleman told Skift in an interview. “But thank goodness there've been so many improvements on the vaccine front and our knowledge of the disease. I think people are feeling more comfortable now to be able to travel. I think there's a lot of pent-up demand.”
[caption id="attachment_429449" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] Breeze Airways founder David Neeleman in front of one of the airlines' Embraer jets. (Cean Orrett/Cean One Studio)[/caption]
That’s good for Breeze. The airline will begin flights just as the U.S. industry is bracing itself for what could be a strong summer for leisure travel. Many discounters plan to fly more this summer than they did in 2019, while major carriers like American Airlines and United Airlines see leisure bookings at or near levels last seen two years ago. Frontier Airlines executives even think the travel surge could last as long as 18 months.
That said, the Breeze's launch has not been without hiccups. A controversial plan to hire college
