Wilmington, Delaware has a rather inconsistent history with commercial air service. Denver-based Frontier Airlines will start service during the first week of July to five destinations. The airport last saw service in 2008 from SkyBus and from Delta in 2007.
None of the service in question will be particularly frequent; Denver gets the most flights at four weekly. That sort of schedule can be performed with relatively low aircraft requirements but it also means virtually no business travelers thanks to the not-so-often flights. That fact isn’t lost on Daniel Shurz, Frontier’s senior vice president, commercial. Shurz notes that Frontier is "[T]argeting primarily leisure customers… It makes access to these great destinations more convenient and certainly more affordable."
The new service from Wilmington is in addition to service to 10 destinations from Trenton (TTN), less than 60 miles up the road. Admittedly the two are split by Philadelphia and cover different cachement areas but they are still mighty close together and will serve many of the same cities. Still, quite interesting to see the build-up of service at smaller airports on the east coast.
If nothing else, these routes represent some great opportunities to collect fun lines and dots on my flight map.
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Biggest problem with ILG is that BWI and PHL are super close by, so there’s more than sufficient service from both legacies and LCCs. For those with tons of time, they could even use TTN, ACY, and DCA.
Even though there’s a decent business community at ILG (every company is incorporated at Wilmington), the market size is simply tiny.
The service probably won’t long but I’m hoping they put some A318s on one or more of the routes. Just like Seth, I’m a dorky list-keeper and wouldn’t mind knocking out one more aircraft type and and one of only a few states where I have not yet flown commercially.
I wonder how much demand there will be for these services, given that F9 will not fly every day, and that all of these destinations are available on WN out of PHL (though TPA and HOU are down to 1x or 2x/day, I think).