Five months ago, when Breeze Airways announced it would begin seasonal service between Vero Beach and Islip, New York, the carrier’s co-founder and vice president, Jim Smith, dangled an incentive as enticing as low introductory fares.
“If the community supports the flight, as we hope it will,” Smith told a press gathering at Islip’s Long Island MacArthur Airport in early October, “that service will grow and expand beyond seasonal and beyond two flights per week.”
Apparently, however, Breeze officials aren’t yet convinced.
Despite saying the public’s response to Breeze’s flights connecting Vero Beach and Islip is “absolutely meeting our expectations,” company spokesman Gareth Edmondson-Jones confirmed last week the airline will pause the service at the end of the month, as planned.
“The service is still seasonal for this year,” Edmondson-Jones wrote in an email to Vero Beach 32963, “but it will come back in October, and it could be extended going forward from there.”
Breeze added the nonstop Vero-Islip flights to its route map on Dec. 21, and the service is scheduled to end on April 28.
Asked to provide the number of passengers that have flown on the Vero-Islip flights through the first three months the service was offered, Edmondson-Jones said the airline doesn’t publicly release those statistics.
However, Vero Beach Airport Director Todd Scher said Breeze officials have indicated the passenger loads on those flights are averaging 70 percent of capacity.
“That’s a pretty good number, particularly for a new route,” Scher said last weekend, adding that he has noticed the airport’s grassy overflow parking lot has been especially crowded in recent weeks as spring break has brought more people to Florida.
Scher, though, said he wasn’t surprised Breeze wasn’t extending its Vero-Islip service beyond the end of the month.
“They usually send me a look-ahead schedule every couple of months, and the last one I saw showed that the end of April is the end of Islip for this season,” he said. “I should get an updated one this week, but I don’t know if it’ll go past September.”
In addition to pausing its seasonal Vero-Islip service, Breeze will be reducing the frequency of its other Vero Beach flights in May, when the number of monthly departures drops from 116 now to 35, Scher said.
Through the summer months, in fact, there will be two days each week – Wednesdays and Saturday – when no Breeze flights will arrive or depart.
“That hasn’t happened since August,” Scher said.
On Feb. 2, Breeze celebrated the first anniversary of its Vero Beach service by announcing that the Utah-based airline had transported more than 105,000 passengers on more than 1,000 flights into and out of the airport here.
Breeze launched its Vero Beach service with twice-weekly flights to Westchester County, New York, and Hartford, Connecticut. Daily service is now offered on both routes.
In November, Breeze added service between Vero Beach and Providence, Rhode Island. The frequency of those flights has increased from three times per week to five times weekly.
The Vero-Islip connection was added four days before Christmas, offering introductory one-way fares as low as $69.
In a statement released on Breeze’s anniversary here, founder and chief executive officer David Neeleman called it an “incredible year,” adding that he was “thrilled to have flown more than 100,000 guests into and out of Vero.”
Vero Beach became one of six destinations Breeze offers from Islip.
Located 60 miles east of Manhattan and 55 miles west of Southampton, Islip is located near the center of Long Island, where its two suburban counties – Nassau and Suffolk – have a combined population of 3 million.
Two other airlines, Southwest and Frontier, also operate out of Islip’s 80-year-old airport, where Vero Beach is one of six destinations offered by Breeze.
During Breeze’s announcement in October, Islip Town Supervisor Angie Carpenter referred to Vero Beach as “Florida’s hidden gem,” adding, “In close proximity are so many more areas that are popular with Long Islanders.”
Scher has said Islip was the “one city that more people kept mentioning over and over” before Breeze added the route in December.