Discussions about the future of commercial service at Bellingham International Airport may sometimes overlook the present — and the presence of the only passenger airline that has both a base at BLI and consistently handles the largest share of travelers on flights.
Allegiant Air marked its 20th anniversary serving Bellingham in 2024. The low-cost carrier has been at BLI for more than half of the airport’s history of passenger jet service dating back to 1985. Allegiant arrived in 2004 and evolved to base both aircraft and personnel in the Bellingham area.
“When we first started in Bellingham, we were running what we called turns from other locations,” said Kristen Schilling-Gonzalez, Allegiant’s vice president of planning. “So Las Vegas aircraft, Las Vegas crew flying up to Bellingham and then back to Las Vegas.”
But after a few years, the airline — founded in 1997 with headquarters now in Las Vegas — saw what Schilling-Gonzalez called “significant” demand from travelers both in Washington state and British Columbia. By 2009, it had established a base at BLI which the airline said is today permanent home to more than 100 employees, including pilots, flight attendants and maintenance and station personnel, as well as two Airbus A319 jets.
Bellingham is one of 24 bases for Allegiant with the next nearest located in Las Vegas and Los Angeles. It also was one of the earliest bases established by the airline and prompted rapid passenger traffic growth at BLI, one reason behind the more than tripling in size of the Bellingham airport terminal in 2014.
“Allegiant,” said Mike Hogan, public affairs administrator for the Port of Bellingham, “is a terrific, low-cost option for millions of potential travelers living within an hour drive of BLI.”
Leading BLI in passenger numbers
Numbers bear out Allegiant’s impact. It currently is, and in recent years consistently has been, the largest carrier in terms of proportion of passengers and total nonstop destinations served.
According to data from the U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS) for the 12 months ending in July 2024, Allegiant handled 43% of BLI’s passengers. During the same period, Southwest Airlines (which ended BLI operations on Aug. 4) had a 41% share and Alaska Airlines/SkyWest had the remainder.
For earlier years, BTS data showed Allegiant still had the lion’s share of passengers even after Southwest started service in 2021: Allegiant had 39% to Southwest’s 34% for all of 2022, and Allegiant tallied 43% compared to 40% for Southwest in calendar 2023.
Prior to the COVID pandemic upending air travel, BTS credited Allegiant with a 67% share of Bellingham passengers in 2019.
“Historically, Allegiant has maintained between approximately 50-60% market share of enplanements [passenger boardings] at BLI since service began except for 2022-2024 when Southwest Airlines entered the market,” Hogan said.
He said that has led the Port to realize revenue from Allegiant’s presence of about $1.2 million a year in both 2023 and estimated for 2024. That figure includes lease payments, boarding and landing fees and other directly related activity.
Publicly traded Allegiant said it couldn’t provide numbers comparing its Bellingham operation to its overall system for competitive reasons. But on a large scale, BTS ranked Allegiant the 11th largest airline in 2023 based on passengers. Allegiant’s own investor information stated that it has nearly 6,000 employees, more than 120 aircraft and more than 550 routes in the U.S.
Allegiant pilot is school bus driver, too
Allegiant’s routes include nonstop flights between Bellingham and six destinations: Phoenix/Mesa, Los Angeles, Oakland, Palm Springs and Las Vegas year round, and San Diego seasonally for the summer. But flight frequency varies, in part because of Allegiant’s laser-like focus on leisure travel and in part because of its out-and-back nonstop route structure — the airline makes a point of saying it doesn’t sell connecting flights.
“For us that means that our crew members start and end their day at base,” said Allegiant’s Schilling-Gonzalez. “These are folks who live in Bellingham and the nearby communities. They’re part of the area.”
Schilling-Gonzalez said that attachment is one reason BLI is a well-running base for the airline in terms of the “operational reliability” of it.
“We don’t necessarily have some of the struggles that we might in some larger cities,” she said. “In Bellingham, all of our crews, they live there. They want to be there.”
They also make a unique kind of local news here.
Hogan recalled that in 2016, Allegiant pilot Mark Miller won first place in the School Bus Driver International Safety Competition. Not only was Miller a Bellingham-based captain for Allegiant, Hogan said, but also a substitute bus driver for Bellingham Public Schools.
Miller still flies for Allegiant and still is a substitute bus driver, according to a July 2024 article on the school district’s website, who “transports our students on yellow buses when his schedule permits.” And, still a winner: Miller also took first place internationally in the Transit Bus category in 2024’s competition.
Canada a key success factor
Schilling-Gonzalez credited both the Bellingham base’s team, and the demand in the Pacific Northwest and north of the border, for Allegiant’s two decades of continued success at BLI. It’s likely not a coincidence that Allegiant lists the airport as “Bellingham WA / Vancouver BC (BLI)” in its website booking engine, nor that speed limit signs on airport roads are printed with both miles and kilometers per hour.
She said after the depths of the pandemic and related border closures — leading to Allegiant ceasing Bellingham flights for about two months in 2020 — passenger volume continues to rise, including Canadian-originating traffic.
“Now we’re up to about two-thirds of our traffic coming from the Canada side for Bellingham,” she said, closer to what it was in the middle of the 2010s. “To me, that just shows there’s a lot of opportunity there.”
Other opportunities, in terms of new BLI routes, may be further off.
Prior to the pandemic, Allegiant had tried flights between Bellingham and several destinations including Honolulu and Maui. Schilling-Gonzalez said most of them didn’t grow enough to work out. But Hawaii was different.
“They did fine for us; actually pretty well,” she said. “The issue was just the aircraft type that we were using was coming up on the end of its life.”
That meant trimming the Hawaii routes and planes. “It wasn’t a demand issue,” she said.
Increasing frequency, not destinations
But now, she said, adding routes would probably mean adding a third jet to the Bellingham base at a time when new Allegiant aircraft on order with Boeing have been slow to roll out. And it would have to keep busy to justify its placement at BLI.
“Do we have enough to make that work, to make sure that that plane is flying, that we’re using that asset to the best of our ability?” she said. “So it’s not as easy as, ‘Oh, we’ll just add one route, see if it works.’ Basically, we would need to find several routes to make sure that they work.”
Schilling-Gonzalez said more likely is the airline’s increased frequency planned for early 2025 to existing destinations like Las Vegas and Palm Springs.
Meanwhile, she said Allegiant will continue its focus on low-cost leisure travel — including ticket sales only from Allegiant directly — and maintaining a strong base and operation in Bellingham.
On her wish list for BLI as Allegiant marks 20 years?
“I’d love to see passenger demand continue to increase,” she said. “The best way for us to know if we should add flights is that our current flights are so full that we have to. Basically, force our hand. Where the only logical thing to do would be to add service.”
Editor’s note: Coming soon, a look at future airline growth plans for Bellingham International Airport.
Frank Catalano writes about business and related topics for CDN; reach him at frankcatalano@cascadiadaily.com.
