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New Haven is just about the same distance to Bradley as Worcester is to Logan. Then you have Manchester which is about 45 minutes from Pease and Pease is about 45 minutes from Portland and all those airports are growing and adding service from Breeze and Avelo or both. So I’m not buying the distance to Logan thing as being a reason why Worcester hasn’t gotten better service. They are pretty much out of room to build more terminal space, etc. at Logan. Why they dump all kinds of $$$ into Worcester and pretty much just let it sit and rot while every nearby out of state airport grows is beyond comprehension.
Avelo isn’t going anywhere. They are profitable and have the best on-time and reliability ratings. Breeze will probably fill all of their planes out of New Haven also. I’d be curious to know if either of them have approached Massport about having service at Worcester and what the response was.
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If spirit can’t make it, Avelo will never make it!!!!!!!!!!! The budget airlines are going down the drain. The middle class can’t afford to support them anymore. McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Burger King, Dunkin, they are all in the same boat, there customer can’t spend the money. The middle class supports the budget airlines, they can’t afford it. Compare a delta ticket to a JB ticket in December, very different prices, but delta is still full. This is what a December vacation cost to FT Lauderdale in the winter. Air Tickets round trip on JB two people $700, Hotel 3 star $2500, rental car mid size $ 700, food etc seven days $1200 the middle can’t do it, I’m going easy on the food drink part.
Rainy boring day so I took a ride to Worcester airport, upper lot is 98% full. Lower lot is 70% full. People on the blog honestly think if Worcester offered 5-10 flights a day, the airport would have enough parking. I don’t think so. People will park at the airport because of the price. It’s $50 for the week. I made this statement before, you drive to the airport from 20 miles out and there is no parking what is your option McDonald’s down the road.
Busy time of year for the airports because you have people on vacation and you also have college students moving this week. Lincoln Plaza was mobbed with college students buying supplies today for their dorms.
But the thing is with all the past comments about the airport parking not being full and how we won’t need it, you have to assume that the flights will be at least 70% full on average. Airlines won’t bring service in unless they think they can hit that number or they get an extremely good deal going to the airport like JetBlue first got with Worcester.
So doing some simple math. Let’s say JetBlue wanted to bring another flight in with the A220 so 140 seats. Lets average a 4 to 1 ratio for people to cars (every 4 people on the plane will have 1 car which factors in the ppl that get dropped off/picked up, families, couples, etc.) so we got 35 cars on a 100% full flight. With Worcester, the average flight load on the lower end is 80% so 28 cars per flight x 7 days a week, that’s 196 cars (won’t multiply by 2 because we assume that if they park at the airport they’ll fly back to it). There’s a total of 624 parking spots at the airport so you can see just how many spots are needed.
Now yes that number doesn’t mean they’ll be 196 cars per week from one flight but you always have to assume that. I have no idea how New Haven does it but worcester has had problems before with it (Christmas break in December/January as well as February break) and if there’s more service to the airport, it would only be worse for people trying to park
https://www.nhregister.com/news/article/Tweed-Airport-parking-reached-capacity-on-holidays-17692232.php
624 parking spots is nothing if you want more service. The parking price is so low for a week of parking everyone drives to the airport. An Uber from Shrewsbury and back would cost more plus tip. How about the employees that work at the airport. More flight more employees. The TSA officers have 6-8 cars, Joe the restaurant/ store owner and his staff 3-4 cars, ground crew 5-10 cars, other staff in the building 5-10 cars, rental car staff 3-5 cars, admin 5-10 cars. 50 cars staff alone. I believe tweed started with 1200 parking spots. I’m not 100% on that number.
Tweed has a reservation system for parking. Their parking prices are very high. The airport increased parking to 1475 from 900 two years ago. As of now 8:30 pm they have 125 spots available, that’s not a lot of parking. When Breeze starts it’s going to get really tight.
There’s an extra flight coming to Worcester tomorrow from Fort Lauderdale according to flight aware and flight radar 24. Anyone have any idea what it could be about? Didn’t see anything for wings for autism or a plane pulling event or any other event.
Update, seems like they’re having 2 scheduled flights for tomorrow. FLL flight was cancelled today so unsure if it was actually scheduled that way or not but not many seats booked on the extra flight
This alleged “parking” issue at ORH is not why we don’t have better service. I think I said this before but Massport has been in control for 14 years at ORH. They should have had the common sense to figure it out by now if it really is a deterrent to more service which I don’t really believe it is. One simple thing Massport could do is copycat New Haven and put the number of available spaces on the ORH website. As far as the parking cost at New Haven, however expensive it is, it isn’t keeping travellers away. I’d gladly pay higher parking fees at ORH if there was better service there. When I fly to West Palm Beach out of Providence, I can reserve parking ahead of time for $14 per day. If ORH could get me to West Palm conveniently, I’d gladly pay $14 or more to park at ORH.
As far as Breeze supposedly adding to the parking issue at New Haven, that’s already being addressed. For one, the airport and the city partnered to offer long term parking in one of the city garages with free shuttle service to/from the airport. I believe they are also leasing space from nearby parking lots that are underutilized.
As it is, Breeze and/or Avelo serve just about every airport in New England except the Massachusetts airports. At some point you have to think one of them is going to look at Massachusetts. It’s a huge market. Not sure why one of them hasn’t set up shop in Worcester yet. Worcester County alone has nearly 900,000 people which you would think is a huge untapped market. With Breeze and Avelo battling it out in New England I can’t see them ignoring Massachusetts for much longer. I guess the question is, where do they set up shop? ORH or Logan. I could possibly see an airline like Breeze doing seasonal Cape Cod flights. There’s also New Bedford Airport. They are supposedly building a new terminal building. If Breeze and/or Avelo end up at Logan then I think the verdict would be in that Massport has no intention, nor did they ever, to grow ORH.
On a side note, I still think ORH needs a re-brand to Worcester-Metrowest Boston Regional Airport or something like that. New identity, major marketing campaign, and incentivize some airlines to add new service.
Haven’t posted in quite a while. Apologies.
Everyone is failing to see the problem. The problem isn’t the airlines, it’s not the parking. It’s not the airport. It’s not the lack of interest, etc etc etc….its Massport. It’s Massport & their absolutely outrageous fees/commissions. All these airlines are going to every airport in New England EXCEPT Worcester….they also are not stepping into Logan either…Not because they don’t want to tap into the Massachusetts market. It’s because they don’t want to deal with Massport. Massport is a Mafia. Massport is a Mob. They will run you ragged on fees. The ONLY reason the 3 we have at ORH are there is because Massport told them they have to be there or they would flatout not approve any future thing they wanted at Logan. Blackmail plain & simple. And the only reason all these airlines are at Logan to begin with is well…it’s Boston. They’d be idiots not to. So they begrudgingly put up with Massport. The airlines hate Massport. Unilaterally. There’s a reason Southwest skipped Logan in the early 00’s for MHT & PVD. Lot of back-door politics. Massport is the mob. Airlines don’t like the mob.
Also, side note; Allegiant is shadow banned from ever operating flights commercially to ORH or Logan ever again. Don’t ever expect them at either ever except for a charter flight. When they pulled out of ORH a decade ago they ran afoul of Massport & you’ll never see them again ever.
I can tell you right now with 100% first hand knowledge on the subject that Southwest, Frontier, Breeze, Spirit, & Allegiant (that one being a pipe dream to begin with seeing as their perma-banned in essence) have all had serious interest in ORH and wanted to implement some sort of service dating back to 2019. The last 5 years, 5 seperate airlines have been serious about ORH. Southwest even came so far as to do site visits several times & did preliminary inspections on the fuel storage& equipment at ORH. Nothings come of any of them…why? Because everything goes though Massport & the Mob’s (Massport’s) terms & conditions where too much each & every time…
Don’t expect me to post again soon unless it’s overly important.
-Rusty
Rusty you are correct in my opinion. Everything in Massachusetts is like the massport issue. I can’t wait to leave permanently. Family and property keep me in Massachusetts. The country of Florida is my next permanent address.