Breeze and Avelo Airlines Help to Drive Connecticut’s Air Travel Comeback

By Joe O’Leary

December 28 @ 5:00 am

To say 2020 was an off year for Bradley International Airport would be a huge understatement. Due to the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, overall flyer traffic in the Windsor Locks airport was down 65% from 2019, with April and May of the month seeing traveler rates drop by more than 90% from the year prior.

It was a fraught time at best for an airline to expand operations, but as travel started picking up again in the spring of 2021, both Breeze Airways and Avelo Airlines joined the fray at Bradley and New Haven’s Tweed Regional Airport, respectively.

Over the last four years, the budget airlines have carried countless passengers, and in the process they’ve helped Bradley recover passenger traffic and Tweed punch well above its weight. The benefits Breeze has brought Bradley can be seen in the airport’s annual traffic statistics, which also reveal a rise in the airline’s popularity from 2021 to 2024. During that time, passenger traffic bounced back at the airport as Breeze carried more passengers each year in the process.

In 2021, the airline, which started carrying traffic in May, delivered just under 26,000 passengers to their destinations. As Bradley saw traffic grow by 25.5% in 2022 and another 7.8% in 2023, Breeze fliers grew accordingly, with 78,017 people using the airline in 2022 and 210,858 in 2023 as it continued adding new destinations.

Now, in 2024, as Bradley continues to see growth with increases in eight of the nine months with available data, Breeze has already topped its 2023 passenger count and is working toward a new high score.

These airlines aren’t solely fueling Connecticut’s travel comeback, but they’re certainly helping bring new attention, especially to Tweed New Haven, which has seen a significant change in its usage since pre-pandemic levels. In 2019, 47,000 people flew in and out of Tweed, with little fanfare. Five years later, after Avelo opened up shop, Tweed is now handling more than 500,000 passengers per year. Combine that with Bradley, which is set to have near-record travel in current projections, and Connecticut air traffic appears set to surge to an all-time high in 2024.

In a precarious period for travel, Breeze and Avelo’s expansion plans helped a resurgence of air traffic in Connecticut, with each airline now offering dozens of destinations and international treks too. They’re working to expand their services even further, as both airlines now fly out of both airports.

These new options provide travelers with competitive rates and service quality on par with their competitors, despite drawbacks, including certain routes that only fly on certain days. They also offer myriad more options for travelers, especially snowbirds and Disney fans in New Haven County, whose trips to JFK or LaGuardia, or even a 45-minute drive to Bradley, now pale in comparison to a quick trip down to the coast.

Where are the airlines at now? Expansion mode. Avelo just announced new routes from New Haven to Florida, Texas, Michigan and Maine, as well as the Dominican Republic; Breeze is now offering service to Florida, South Carolina, Virginia, North Carolina and Louisiana out of Tweed.