Breeze Airlines offers breath of fresh air to Akron-Canton Airport and entire region

BREEZE AIRLINES

OFFERS A BREATH OF FRESH AIR TO AKRON-CANTON AIRPORT AND ENTIRE REGION

BY BRIAN LISIK / PHOTOS PROVIDED BY AKRON-CANTON AIRPORT

As the airline industry continues its slow but inexorable return to normalcy following the fallout of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, both Akron-Canton Airport (CAK) officials and community leaders feel the airport’s newest airline partnership has positioned CAK for a leading role in that recovery.

“I think we have a tremendous opportunity with the airport and having an airline like Breeze choosing us as a hub in Northeast Ohio,” said Canton Regional Chamber of Commerce President and CEO Dennis Saunier of CAK’s most recent partnership with Breeze Airlines.

Air service, Saunier said, is vital to any region for attracting business, retaining business and serving residents. Breeze began servicing three nonstop routes — to Charleston, South Carolina; New Orleans and Tampa — from CAK in June 2021, making CAK one of 16 airports on Breeze’s network.

The partnership was made possible through the efforts and financial investment of both CAK and community stakeholders, including area businesses and the Greater Akron and Canton Regional chambers. The two chambers, Saunier explained, acted primarily as the fundraising arm of the effort, along with a JobsOhio incentive program to reinstate air service to CAK.

“We started looking at it as a regional opportunity — particularly since we are now looking at our region as a metroplex,” Saunier said.

A JobsOhio Commercial Air Service Restoration grant was first used in late 2020 to entice Delta Airlines to return its Atlanta connection from CAK, which was discontinued during the pandemic. That effort was unsuccessful, but airport officials already were talking to ownership at Moxy — soon to be Breeze — airlines about joining United, American and Spirit at CAK. The committee of chambers, the Stark County Economic Development Board and other community stakeholders were also hard at work, Saunier said.

“Within a little over a month, we had raised a sizable amount,” he said.

Saunier added that the airport’s pre-pandemic efforts such

as its $37 million gate modernization and expansion project had positioned it perfectly for both attracting the three Breeze routes and more in the future, calling the decision to move ahead with that project at the height of pandemic uncertainty the epitome of entrepreneurship.

“(The Breeze addition) gives us an opportunity to build upon that success,” Saunier said. “When you become complacent, you begin to lose control of your destiny.”

Renato “Ren” Camacho, president and chief executive officer for CAK, said the loss of four key routes — Atlanta, Houston, La Guardia and Chicago — in the first five months of 2020 dealt a huge blow to the airport. The JobsOhio program, including a $4 match from the state for every dollar raised locally in an 80/20 split up to $10 million, informed a new focus for CAK, Camacho said.

“We had to recalibrate where we wanted to go for air service,” he said. “Truthfully, we expanded our scope to not only (try to) restore service, but look for opportunities (with new carriers).”

Breeze, Camacho said, fit the bill in a number of ways. For one, its founder David Neeleman is also the founder of the JetBlue and Azul airlines, and the Breeze partnership presented an opportunity to bring key dual class — leisure and commercial — routes back to CAK. The Breeze business model states that the company seeks to provide nonstop service between underserved routes across the U.S. at affordable fares.

The nonstop routes from CAK include a one day per week to Tampa that began June 26, two to three flights per week to New Orleans and four flights per week to Charleston.

Camacho said that passenger “enplanements,” counted as the number of people boarding planes, dropped from 830,000 in 2019 to 220,000 in 2020 at CAK. The airport is set to surpass its total 2020 enplanements by August of this year.

While leisure travel is still driving the entire airline industry at this point, Camacho said he feels it is inevitable that business travel eventually will return.

“I still think at the end of the day, people are going to want to get on a plane, shake a hand — especially in certain types of industries,” he said. “People want to explore.”