McKee Gets Big Win — Neeleman's Breeze Airline Signs on to Fly at T.F. Green

McKee Gets Big Win — Neeleman's Breeze Airline Signs on to Fly at T.F. Green

Governor Dan McKee has scored a major win for the Rhode Island tourism industry and the economy.

JetBlue’s Founder David Neeleman is bringing his new airline Breeze to Providence. The airline has been three years in the making by Neeleman, who is one of the airline industry's most accomplished executives, and received federal approval earlier this week to begin operation. Tickets began selling this morning at 8:00 AM

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Initially, Breeze offers direct flights to Pittsburgh, Charleston, and Norfolk. 

But, Neeleman is a big thinker and one of the biggest innovators in airline history -- part Lee Iaccoca and part Elon Musk.

Providence could be a launching point for direct flights to the West Coast and to Europe.

Neeleman also founded the Brazilian airline Azul in 2008.

Breeze was first announced in 2018 as Moxy and GoLocal began covering the development of the airline. In 2020, the Neeleman announced a rebranding to Breeze.

“We have met with them and we believe Breeze presents an excellent opportunity for Rhode Islanders. We have both terminal and airfield capacity that they will need, including an updated and fully staffed International Arrival Facility. We look forward to continuing our dialogue with their excellent team,” Iftikhar Ahmad, CEO of the Rhode Island Airport Corporation, told GoLocal in January, 2020.

The effort to secure Breeze has been three years in the making for airport executives.

Today, Breeze is positioned with a tech and service play that is designed as best in class.

The company writes, "We are a team of aviation, hospitality and technology enthusiasts who believe flying is the greatest privilege and opportunity in the world. And, we believe it should be an accessible and genuinely nice experience for everyone. Together, we created Breeze Airways - a new airline merging technology with kindness. Breeze provides nonstop service between underserved routes across the U.S. at affordable fares. With seamless booking, no change or cancellation fees and customized flight features delivered via a sleek and simple app, Breeze makes it easy to buy and easy to fly. Welcome to Breeze, Seriously Nice™ flights and fares."

The company has the advantage of new efficient planes and best in class technology.

 

In June 2019, GoLocal reported of then-Moxy:

De facto, Providence would be the hub, “Moxy seems keen on secondary airports in the country’s biggest metro areas like Boston, New York, Washington, Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles. Providence, outside Boston, features prominently as an example in Moxy’s presentation.”

According to the reports, “On a map of prospective routes, it shows Providence flights to Allegiant-like airports in Florida (i.e., Orlando Sanford and St. Petersburg) and California (i.e., Oakland, San Jose, Contra Costa, Orange County, Burbank, Ontario and McClellan-Palomar, north of San Diego). Other dots from Providence include Phoenix Mesa, Rocky Mountain Airport near Denver, Concord near Charlotte, Fort Worth’s Meacham Airport and Burke Lakefront Airport in Cleveland. Aside from Providence, other northeast region airports of interest to Moxy include Baltimore, Trenton, Stewart (halfway between New York City and Albany) and Republic Airport in eastern Long Island."

"Asked if Breeze was likely to launch with a nationwide set of destinations or go with a more regional approach, Neeleman said 'probably more regionally. We don’t want to spread ourselves too thin,'" reports the website The Points Guy -- a leading travel website.

"Neeleman believes there are hundreds of markets ripe for Breeze’s nonstop service. He pointed to the series of airline mergers in the U.S. during the past two decades, saying that the bigger carriers that have emerged have increasingly focused on building up their major hub airports," according to The Points Guy. "That’s left travelers – especially leisure customers – with fewer options for nonstop flights between smaller and mid-sized markets."

“I’m always skeptical about startups, but Neeleman does have an amazing record and is coming into this with an enormous amount of capital,” said Jay Shabat, senior analyst at Skift Airline Weekly. “This thing is not going to run out of money fast. In that sense, he will have staying power.”

“There hasn’t been a successful startup airline in the United States since JetBlue,” Shabat said. “And that was at a time when the legacy carriers were a bloated mess. It was easy. Neeleman came up with this idea of, ‘Why don’t we go into JFK, no one is paying attention?’ These big guys just had costs that were so much higher. But it wouldn’t be that way now. The Deltas and the Americans of the world are tough competitors. They are pretty lean.”