New airline to Las Vegas adding more flights in September
Breeze Airways, a discount air carrier that will begin service to three destinations from Las Vegas in June and four more in August, will add flights to two more cities in September.
The Salt Lake City-based company announced Wednesday that it will add daily nonstop round-trip flights to Las Vegas from Westchester County Airport in New York beginning Sept. 8 and twice-weekly service to Las Vegas from Hartford, Connecticut, beginning Sept. 7, to and from Harry Reid International Airport in Las Vegas.
Hartford flights will be scheduled Wednesdays and Saturday.
The Las Vegas service is part of a big expansion for Breeze at Westchester with the introduction of eight new routes, seven of them nonstop.
In addition to Las Vegas service, Breeze is adding daily flights to and from Los Angeles and San Francisco. Prior to that planned service, travelers from Westchester, a reliever airport north of metropolitan New York City at White Plains, could only fly as far west as Chicago on nonstop flights.
“This is exciting news for Westchester County residents who are eager to have convenient flights to the West Coast,” said Hugh Greechan, a Westchester County Department of Public Works and Transportation commissioner.
The move also will add more than 1,000 seats a week on flights to Las Vegas from markets in upstate New York and Connecticut. The Breeze flights to Westchester and Hartford won’t have nonstop competitors.
Breeze is acquiring 80 new twin-engine Airbus A220-300 jets with a capacity of 126 seats. The company has options on 40 more and future versions of the jet will have 137 seats. New aircraft will be delivered once a month for the next six years.
“The A220-300 is a game-changer for us as we now add long-haul flights and transcontinental service,” David Neeleman, Breeze’s founder and CEO, said last month when the initial announcement about Breeze coming to Las Vegas was made.
“The A220 embodies the Breeze ideal of merging kindness with technology, pairing unrivaled passenger comfort with eco-friendly efficiency,” he said. “With the A220, Breeze is giving the widest cabin, highest ceiling, largest windows and biggest overhead stowage in this class, while still managing to burn 25 percent less fuel.”
Neeleman has personal experience trying to get to the West from New York.
“Having lived so close to Westchester airport for many years, I wasted tons of time driving to JFK or Newark to travel to the West Coast,” Neeleman said. “Now we’ll offer daily flights to the highest demand markets from New York, with the state-of-the-art Airbus A220 aircraft which pairs unrivaled comfort with 36 first class, 10 extra legroom and 80 standard seats — and half the noise footprint of past generations.”
Contact Richard N. Velotta at rvelotta@reviewjournal.com or 702-477-3893. Follow @RickVelotta on Twitter.