KAILUA-KONA — Alaska Airlines announced Thursday 13 new nonstop routes from the Bay Area, including its first between San Francisco and Kona, which will run daily and is set to begin on Dec. 14.
The flight, which will be marketed under Virgin America, was added along with several others roughly three months after Alaska Airlines acquired the company in December of last year.
The announcement comes on the heels of news that United Airlines will begin running a daily flight between Kona International Airport and Denver during the summer months. Those flights are scheduled to begin June 8. It’s all part of a larger trend pushing more and more air traffic into West Hawaii.
“In 2017, Kona will also see large additions in service from Bellingham, Dallas/Fort Worth, Seattle … and Haneda,” Daniel Nahoopii, director of tourism research with the Hawaii Tourism Authority (HTA), wrote in an email to WHT Thursday.
Ross Birch, executive director of Hawaii Island’s Visitors and Convention Bureau, said the uptick in lift between Kona and the mainland, as well as Japan, isn’t as sudden as it seems. Instead, it is the result of a multi-year ramp up.
Over the last three years, Kona has experienced a 29 percent increase in lift, averaging out to nearly a 10 percent annual gain during that period.
“What it is showing is that in the Denver area most recently, and then the San Francisco or Bay Area, we still have a great following,” he said. “More and more people are doing searches for flights to Kona. Airlines move their aircraft where they start seeing people searching for flights, which (they can do) fairly easily in and out of markets.”
An A320 family aircraft with a carrying capacity of roughly 150 passengers will fly each way between Kona and San Francisco seven days per week, providing the potential for roughly 55,000 more visitors to Hawaii Island annually.
Flights will depart from San Francisco at 11 a.m. PST, arriving in Kona at 2:30 p.m. HST.
Return flights to the Bay Area will take off from Kona at 3:30 p.m. HST and land in San Francisco at 10:35 p.m. PST.
Birch said the trend of running daily flights into Kona is likely to continue as airlines become more familiar with the demand for air travel to Hawaii Island and the preferences of those who wish to fly here.
“Airlines are finding it’s a little more profitable for them to run a 150-passenger plane daily instead of doing it three times weekly with a 300-passenger plane,” he explained. “It gives visitors more options and different lengths of stays. And it’s a more efficient (plane) for airlines to fly on a regular basis.”
That’s good news for Hawaii Island as well, said Nahoopii.
This past year, the Big Island registered a 2.3 percent bump in arrivals to 1.55 million visitors. That increase helped generate an 11.8 percent increase in visitor spending on the island to a little more than $2 billion, Nahoopii said.
According to numbers provided by the HTA, visitors to the Big Island represent 13 percent of visitor spending across Hawaii as well as 15 percent of all visitor days statewide.
“There are really no signs for us of slowing down,” he said.