Whatever happens in Vegas will stay there: Frontier ending nonstop Charlotte flights
Frontier Airlines, a low-fare carrier, is cutting its nonstop route from Las Vegas to Charlotte’s airport, according to reports by industry watchers and the airline’s own website calendar.
As of Thursday, direct nonstop flights are only available though early April from Charlotte Douglas International Airport to Harry Reid International Airport.
The five-hour flight is one of 16 routes dropped by Frontier cited by industry experts because of airlines having too many flight options to popular vacation destinations. During a fourth-quarter earnings call last month, Frontier CEO Barry Biffle said some direct routes to destinations like Las Vegas and Orlando were going to be scrapped by the summer.
“To be clear, we’re not retreating from our network footprint in either market,” he said. Frontier is planning to cut unprofitable flights from those airports, with its goal to remain a low-cost leader in the Orlando and Las Vegas markets, Biffle said.
This includes canceling service from Las Vegas to Charlotte Douglas International Airport, according to The Points Guy, a travel website. A timetable from Cirium, a provider of aviation analytics referenced in The Points Guy report, listed 16 routes being cut from airports around the country. The Las Vegas to Charlotte route was one of them.
Ishrion Aviation, an X (formerly known as Twitter) page covering airline routes, also brought attention to Frontier cutting routes. It said Frontier closed sales and removed the Charlotte to Las Vegas route from its schedule after April 9. It was originally planned to operate through early August, according to Ishrion Aviation.
Frontier did not return repeated messages and calls from The Charlotte Observer.
About Frontier Airlines and CLT
Frontier started nonstop service from Charlotte in summer 2019, with service being offered once a day in each direction seasonally. The airline came to Charlotte Douglas International Airport in 2014.
The Denver-based airline announced new routes out of Charlotte Douglas. Nonstop service starting May 16 to the Cincinnati region was the latest.
In January, Frontier announced service to seven new places with service starting in the spring and summer. The airport destinations are: New York/LaGuardia; Houston-Bush; Dallas-Forth Worth; Chicago O’Hare; Baltimore-Washington; Buffalo, New York, and San Juan, Puerto Rico.
Charlotte Douglas ranked as the seventh-busiest airport in the world for arrivals and departures, according to the Airport Council International’s preliminary rankings for 2022. In 2023, the airport broke records for passenger travel with 53.4 million passengers.
