More Direct Flights Back On Board at XNA

Aaron Burkes, CEO of Northwest Arkansas National Airport in Highfill.

There’s nothing like a pandemic to throw a monkey wrench into an airport’s long-range planning.

Northwest Arkansas National Airport has been on the hunt for low-fare airlines almost from the moment it opened for business in 1998. When the COVID-19 pandemic shut down most air travel earlier this year, XNA saw its passenger totals drop approximately 96% compared with 2019.

That’s not an environment conducive to convincing airlines to expand their route networks to the Highfill airport.

“We really are just focused on taking care of the airlines we have right now,” XNA CEO Aaron Burkes said. “We are obviously continuing discussions with other carriers, but most of the other carriers are not looking to expand in other markets right now. Most of them are in survival mode.”

XNA offered direct flights to 18 destinations but that dropped to five during the shutdown, Burkes said. The total is back up to 13 with flights to Washington, D.C., and Miami scheduled to resume this month.

The airport has scratched back to 20% of its numbers compared with a year ago, which Burkes said is a “pretty good number” after the barren days of April and May.

XNA has added flights from low-fare carriers Allegiant and Frontier recently, and Allegiant was the airport’s No. 2 carrier before the pandemic. Frontier’s low-fare flights from XNA to Denver have recently resumed.

Andrew Branch, XNA’s chief business development officer, said the airport was hoping to expand Frontier’s routes from XNA before the pandemic hit.

“That probably won’t happen this year,” Branch said. “If their Denver flight continues to do well, it is in the cards in the future that they add some flights.”

Branch acknowledged that the airline everyone seems to want to come to XNA is Southwest Airlines, but any agreement is at least a few years away.