Washington – Southwest Airlines, the nation’s largest low-cost airline, is taking a serious look at expanding its service into Syracuse, U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer said Thursday.
Schumer, D-N.Y., said he spoke with Southwest Chairman and CEO Gary Kelly about adding service to Syracuse, the only large Upstate New York city not served by the airline.
At the end of their conversation Wednesday night, Schumer said, he was more encouraged than at any time in the past two decades since he started pitching Southwest Airlines to add service to Syracuse.
“I am more optimistic about this conversation than any one I had,” Schumer told Syracuse.com | The Post-Standard in an interview Thursday.
“I told him that Southwest had a lot of success in Rochester, Buffalo and Albany,” Schumer said about his phone call with Kelly. “He acknowledged that. And I told him it makes sense to expand to Syracuse.”
Schumer, the Senate majority leader, said he told Kelly that Southwest was missing out on a potentially large and loyal market of business and leisure travelers in Central New York.
Airline traffic nationwide reached its highest level over the Memorial Day weekend since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, with more than 7.1 million people traveling by air.
“What I told him is people are ready for travel, and this is a good time to get a steady and loyal customer base,” Schumer said.
Southwest Airlines spokesman Brian Parrish confirmed Thursday that Kelly spoke with Schumer, but he said the airline had no announcements to make regarding new service. Schumer declined to say what Kelly told him in their private conversation.
Schumer said he expects the Dallas-based airline will decide quickly about whether to enter the Syracuse market.
“I am feeling good about it,” Schumer said. “I think we will hear relatively soon.”
Before the pandemic, Southwest operated more than 4,000 flights a day serving 103 destinations in the United States and 10 additional countries.
The airline is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year and has announced plans to expand to several cities as it returns to profitability. Southwest Airlines recorded a $116 million profit in this year’s first quarter.
Schumer wields considerable influence with Southwest and other airlines as the Senate majority leader. He spoke with Kelly and other airline CEOs throughout the pandemic as Congress passed a series of bills to help keep airlines solvent through the crisis.
Southwest Airlines received more than $7 billion in federal aid through the coronavirus relief bills intended to keep airlines flying and to keep employees on their payrolls.
All told, the airline industry received $64 billion in cash and low-interest loans from the federal government during the pandemic.
Schumer has pushed for years to lure low-cost airlines to Upstate New York after business leaders told him the lack of affordable and frequent air service was an impediment to attracting new companies.
The lack of affordable air service also added to the costs for businesses operating in the region.
The senator first began lobbying Southwest Airlines founder Herbert D. Kelleher in 1999 to add service to Syracuse and Upstate New York.
But as the airline added service to Albany and Rochester, passengers from Central New York in search of lower fares often drove to those airports from Syracuse, cutting into traffic at Hancock International Airport.
In the interim, Schumer convinced JetBlue to serve Syracuse as its first discount airline in 2001, with all flights using Kennedy Airport as a hub for service to other cities.
Since then, two other low-cost carriers have added service to Syracuse. Ultra-low-cost Allegiant Air began serving Syracuse in 2015 and Frontier Airlines followed in 2018.
When Frontier arrived in 2018, the Syracuse Regional Airport Authority called it a called it a “watershed moment” in the effort to bring lower fares to Syracuse air travelers.
The new competition landed Syracuse in second place on the U.S. Department of Transportation’s list of cities with fastest falling airfares in 2018.
With more choices, passenger traffic at Syracuse’s airport soared to its highest level in three decades. More people flew in and out of Hancock Airport in 2019 – 2.5 million – than at any time since 1990.
As part of the pandemic relief bills passed by Congress, Schumer secured $29 million to help offset losses last year at Hancock Airport, and $934 million for airports across the state.
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