By several measures, Vermont’s primary airport is making major gains.
Though it’s seen some routes come and go, the Patrick Leahy Burlington International Airport in South Burlington has the greatest number of destinations available in 33 years, according to U.S. Department of Transportation data.
Its finances have stabilized, and passenger demand at the City of Burlington-owned airport is approaching record levels.
“We’re filling these planes, and they’re getting bigger,” said Nic Longo, the airport’s director of aviation. “That’s the demand that we see, and that’s the demand the airlines see.”
But those promising trends have not necessarily translated to consistent routes or cheaper airfare for passengers.
In the past few years, the airport has weathered the loss of several routes. And when compared to peer airports in New England — such as Manchester-Boston Regional Airport in New Hampshire, Bradley International Airport in Connecticut, or Boston Logan International Airport — it has some of the highest average ticket prices in the region, according to Department of Transportation data.
The small regional airport must contend with broader industry challenges — including airspace constraints in connecting airports and an increasingly consolidated airline market in which four airlines control 80% of domestic air travel.
Those headwinds haven’t stopped Burlington airport officials from pursuing projects to expand the airport. One that’s currently underway will significantly expand the airport’s northern terminal. Its completion would amount to “bringing a modern, 21st century terminal to the Burlington area,” Longo said.
Another project, while early in the process, would do the same for the airport’s southern terminal. (A third endeavor, a long-planned airport hotel, has been in the works for years but remains in limbo.)
“We’re going to keep moving forward, adding more airlines, adding more competition to drive those prices down where we can,” Longo said. “We don’t have ultimate control — we have no control over the ticket prices — the little piece of the puzzle that we do have is, what does it cost us to run this airport?”
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Highs and lows
For years, the Burlington airport’s northern terminal was well-suited to accommodate aircraft like the Embraer ERJ 145 and the SAAB 340, planes with capacity to seat 30 to 50 passengers.
Nowadays, the same terminal space serves as a hub for Boeing 737s and Airbus A320s, aircraft with room for up to 200 passengers, regularly queued up for 6 a.m. departures to New York City or Washington D.C., area airports.
It’s created a congested, “confusing” area to navigate, Longo said.
“We can’t operate that way anymore,” he added, surveying the building from the fenced off, concrete tarmac outside of the terminal.
A $50 million development project underway, dubbed Project NexT, aims to alleviate that. Set to be completed in the summer of 2027, airport officials hope it will help capture a demand the airport — and much of the country — has not seen in years.
The airport has experienced a steady recovery since 2020, when air travel plummeted during the Covid-19 pandemic.
In 2023, 649,557 passengers boarded planes at BTV, up from 200,182 in 2020, according to Federal Aviation Administration data.
Passenger traffic peaked in 2008, when 747,559 people boarded aircraft at the airport, according to FAA data. It also surpassed 700,000 passengers in 2007 and 2009, according to the data.
While 2024 data is not yet available, Longo said passenger numbers likely approached 700,000 — a number the airport has only hit three times in 25 years.
The airport had 71,265 passengers board aircraft in October — well over the high of 66,609 in October 2008, he noted.
Project NexT would accommodate this growth by significantly expanding the airport’s northern terminal — extending the building northwards by some 100 yards and adding a third story to increase capacity for passengers, airline and airport personnel, Longo said.
The project is benefiting from $34 million in federal grant funding, including a major earmark former U.S. Sen. Patrick Leahy secured before retiring in 2023, as well as funds from the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. (The city subsequently renamed the airport after Leahy.)
Longo said that while the airport is also using passenger facility charges as a local funding source, “The only reason we’re building these terminal projects” is because the majority of the funds are not coming out of the airport’s budget.
The project would connect four new jet bridges to the building, Longo said. He views it as “bringing a modern, 21st century terminal to the Burlington area.”
“There’s so many components that we have to catch up on because the demand of the flying public is already here, otherwise we wouldn’t be seeing historic numbers,” Longo said.
At the same time, he also acknowledged that the airport is failing to attract a large percentage of local travelers.
“We want passengers to use the Burlington airport. We don’t want people driving” to other airports in the region, he said. “Yet, we know that within our market area, about 50% of our market area does drive somewhere else to fly out.”
The reasons for this are not entirely clear, but convenience and cost likely play a role. While data shows average ticket fares out of the Burlington-owned airport, adjusted for inflation, have decreased over the years, questions around the affordability of flying out of the airport have persisted.
In the second quarter of 2024 — the latest data made available by the Department of Transportation — the average round-trip ticket for a flight out of the Burlington airport, adjusted for inflation, was $514, according to the data.
Meanwhile, average airfare out of Logan in Boston during the same time period was $391. In Manchester, it was $426, and out of Albany, New York, it was $433.
How airlines determine their fares is very complex. “It’s like Wall Street,” Longo said.
Fares are influenced by the price Longo and his team charge the airlines to use the airport. But ultimately, the price consumers pay for an airline ticket, and the destinations that carriers offer at the airport, are set entirely by those companies.
“We are at the mercy of the airlines. There’s no doubt about it,” Longo said.
The big four
The airline market in the United States has arguably never been more consolidated — a trend experts say has had an outsize impact on smaller airports like Burlington’s.
Four legacy airlines — United Airlines, Delta Air Lines, American Airlines and Southwest Airlines — now control two thirds of domestic air travel in the United States, according to reporting from The New York Times.
Bill McGee, a senior fellow for aviation and travel at the American Economic Liberties Project, argues these companies’ share of the market is closer to 80%, when factoring in their regional subsidiaries, such as American Eagle and United Express, which operate under the parent company but utilize smaller planes.
“What I’m saying is not hyperbole, it’s documented — the first airline ticket in this country was sold in 1914, and you have to go back to the 1910s, prior to World War I, to find a time when we have had such a concentrated industry,” McGee said.
McGee is an advocate for greater government regulation of the airline industry, akin to how it was managed before President Jimmy Carter signed the Airline Deregulation Act in 1978, allowing airlines to fly whatever route they chose and to set their own prices.
In the decades prior to that law, the government was responsible for setting both ticket prices and routes, allowing for a built-in level of profit guaranteed to air carriers.
At the time, some airlines actually opposed deregulation, according to reporting from the Financial Times. Delta Airlines argued that deregulation would result in “service deterioration at smaller cities and in smaller markets.”
Without regulation, McGee argued, airlines are free to stop serving cities entirely, if they conclude those destinations are not profitable enough.
“The decisions that the airlines make make sense to them, but they don’t make sense for the rest of us,” McGee said.
John Strong, a business professor at the College of William & Mary who focuses on the airline industry, said that much of the issues the country is facing now in the airline industry are not necessarily the result of deregulation “as much as the consolidation that took place in the early 2000s.”
He pointed to four mergers that occurred in a four-year period: Delta merging with Northwest Airlines in 2010; Southwest merging with AirTran in 2011; United merging with Continental Airlines in 2012; and American Airlines merging with US Airways in 2013.
“You went from eight carriers to four. That consolidation had more effect on fares and services than the general deregulation of the market,” he said. “I think this is more a question not of deregulation, but a question of antitrust policy.”
Meanwhile, only two new airlines have launched in the past 16 years, McGee said.
This consolidation “has had a tremendous effect” on smaller, regional airports like Burlington, McGee said.
Average airfares adjusted for inflation have been steadily decreasing since 1978, according to Department of Transportation data. But those averages can be misleading.
While airports with heavily trafficked routes and low-cost carriers have seen airfare costs drop, smaller cities have seen prices for routes increase, according to reporting from the Financial Times.
In a research paper published in January 2024 titled “How to Fix Flying,” McGee and coauthor Ganesh Sitaraman, a Vanderbilt Law School professor, argued that small and mid-sized cities have suffered the consequences of consolidation.
Airlines have decreased service to cities such as Pittsburgh and St. Louis, while raising prices, despite demand in these markets, the paper found, leaving such places “with serious downsides for their economic opportunities.”
Since the pandemic, many small airports across the country have seen service decrease or stop altogether, according to the New York Times.
“That affects life in ways that people don’t always think about,” McGee said. “Colleges in the area, are they going to attract students who live in other parts of the country? It affects corporations that are thinking of opening offices there. It just has so many far-reaching effects.”
At even smaller airports like Burlington’s, it’s made the job of courting carriers all the more delicate.
“We can’t go to airlines and say, ‘We want you to start doing this,'” said Jeff Bartley, the airport’s director of innovation and marketing. “They are the ones that are driving that. We can make the pitch as much as we want and can give the data, but we can’t go to United and say ‘Go to Nashville.'”
McGee offered a similar assessment. “The way that we have to look at it is, we the passengers are not the customers of the airport. The airlines are the customers of the airport,” he said. “That’s who they have to please.”
Longo agreed that the market’s consolidation has ultimately driven up costs for airfare out of Burlington and made bringing in more routes all the more difficult.
“That’s a problem. That’s a big problem,” Longo said of the market’s consolidation, “and that hurts communities like Burlington, not just from an average ticket price, but from a competition standpoint.”
He added, “You go to Europe, and you can buy a $20 ticket — a one-way ticket to, generally, anywhere in the European market, to an extent, and that’s because of … competition, and they have that and they have that availability.”
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Healthy competition?
But the past decade has seen the entrance of newer, low-cost carriers that have started to disrupt the airline market.
New airlines like Breeze Airways and Frontier Airlines have found a foothold in the market by offering nonstop routes to destinations, rather than routing those flights through central hub airports like New York, Atlanta or Chicago.
Longo and his team have had some success in recent years in attracting these new airlines. In 2023, the Burlington airport announced that Breeze Airways would begin offering year-round direct flights to Tampa and Orlando.
And in October of this year, the airport welcomed back Frontier, a low-cost carrier that departed in 2019. It also operates nonstop service to Tampa and Orlando.
Longo and Bartley said that maintaining competition is their best path to keeping fares as low as possible for consumers. By bringing in low-cost carriers, while keeping legacy carriers such as Delta and United, the airport can try to bring fares down and, eventually, attract local travelers who are currently opting for other airports.
“If we have a healthy competition, that does help with an overall ticket price,” Longo said. “And the bottom line for a passenger is, there’s all these residual decisions that a family and a passenger needs to make. How much is parking? How much is my time worth? How much is the drive going to be to that airport?”
Experts who analyze the industry say this approach has been effective in bringing down fares.
The entrance of Breeze and Frontier to Burlington’s airport “are really going to drive down the cost,” McGee said.
“There’s no question … You can absolutely count on it,” he said. “And if for any reason … if Frontier says we’re not going to serve that route anymore — when an ultra low-cost carrier leaves a route, whether it’s because of bankruptcy or merger, or they just decide they’re not going to operate on that route anymore for whatever reason — then fares will go up, and they will go up about 24 hours later. It’s that apparent.”
This was evident in 2023, when Jetblue, another low-cost carrier that had operated two round-trip flights daily between Burlington and New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport, announced it would be pulling out of Burlington’s airport entirely.
At around the same time, Delta Airlines announced that it would be reducing its flights between Burlington and New York airports — scaling back its three daily round-trip flights between Burlington and JFK to one, and its four daily round-trip flights between Burlington and LaGuardia Airport in Queens to two.
JetBlue at the time cited “ongoing air traffic control staffing challenges” in the New York airspace. Air traffic control shortages and space constraints limiting how many aircraft can land or take off in the airspace have led to a tightening of flights to and from those airports, leading to several carriers cutting New York flights, Strong said.
After these decisions went into effect, average fares out of Burlington to New York in the first quarter of 2024 spiked by more than 60% — with ticket prices rising from $163 in the first quarter of 2023 to $263 in the same quarter of 2024, according to Department of Transportation data.
Longo said his team will be meeting with Jetblue later this year to “discuss further opportunities” at the airport. “However, there is no current commitment from JetBlue to return to BTV at this time,” he said.
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‘Slim pickings’
Gene Richards, Longo’s predecessor, said he’s not convinced the entrance of new low-cost carriers will be a silver bullet for improving prices and service at the airport. Low-cost carriers, he said, are often not as dependable as legacy airlines.
“They don’t always show up on time,” he said. “If there is an interruption in their service, they don’t have a lot of aircraft to fill, so you tend to have more problems with them, with service and maintenance of their aircraft.”
He added that, with low-cost carriers, “You might pick up some additional service, but you’re really taking a wicked chance of losing your major. Those are the cards you don’t fool with.”
When Richards began as the airport’s interim director of aviation in 2012, there were only 10 destinations available out of the airport, according to Department of Transportation flight data.
“It was just pretty slim pickings,” Richards said.
His focus was on convincing legacy carriers such as United and Delta to bring their mainline aircraft to Burlington, rather than relying on smaller planes through their regional subsidiaries. The latter, he said, tend to have more cancellations and delays.
The airport entered into contracts with its legacy airlines in 2016, committing the airlines to operate over a specified timeframe.
Contracts with Delta, American and United have remained and were extended to June of this year, Longo said. Airport leadership is currently in negotiations with these airlines for new agreements.
Longo said that low-cost carriers have not yet signed contracts similar to those signed by legacy carriers, but said that Breeze and Frontier “have requested to participate in our negotiations for a signatory airline contract identical to United, American and Delta, which we are actively negotiating.”
‘A resilient path to recovery’
Keeping all of these airlines flying out of Burlington is paramount to both the airport’s and customers’ service expectations, Longo said.
While he is optimistic about the airport’s future, particularly with the entrance of Breeze and Frontier, he’s under no illusions about the importance of keeping legacy carriers.
“Don’t get me wrong, those legacy carriers are critical to Burlington and small markets like us,” Longo said. “We need American Airlines to go to Charlotte. We need United Airlines to go to Chicago. We need Delta Airlines to go to Atlanta. Those are so critical for the connectivity to really anywhere in the world.”
Longo is skeptical of whether airfare prices will go down dramatically in the current market conditions. “It’s all about the competition of airlines, both in our market area and beyond,” he said.
Regardless, the airport finds itself in a solid financial position. In December, Moody’s Investors Service upgraded the airport’s credit rating to a “Baa2” rating, with a stable outlook.
It’s the airport’s highest credit rating in 15 years, marking a vast improvement from when it had “junk bond” status prior to 2014, a designation that comes with high interest rates for the airport’s revenue bonds, conveying risky, lower-quality bonds available to investors.
Similarly, Fitch Ratings in March 2024 gave the airport’s revenue bonds a “BBB” rating, explaining in a press release that the airport had maintained a stabilized level of volume “given its relatively small traffic base.”
The ratings agency said there had been “some observed volatility” in the market area and noted that any decrease in traffic levels could lead to a rating downgrade — or conversely, a rating upgrade, if traffic levels increased.
But the ratings agency noted that the Burlington airport had “no nearby domestic competition,” and had “demonstrated a resilient path to recovery, witnessing a significant surge in passenger activity.”
Strong, the College of William & Mary professor, affirmed this, and said that Burlington’s airport remains an attractive option for both passengers and airlines.
“I think Burlington is fortunate in being one of the winners of the regional airports, just because of its catchment area, its traffic,” he said. “Burlington’s overall position was going to make it attractive no matter what.”