Spirit Airlines now offers daily Albuquerque-Vegas flights

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Spirit Airlines is adding daily flights out of Albuquerque. The first flight from Albuquerque to Las Vegas, Nevada, took off from the Albuquerque International Sunport Wednesday morning.

A lucky passenger won two free round-trip tickets and a hotel stay as part of the celebration. Officials with the budget airline said it started service to and from Albuquerque for a good reason.

“We’ve been looking at it for a long time,” said John Kirby, the vice president of Network Planning at Spirit Airlines. “We’ve seen the growth in the marketplace. A lot of people are moving here. A lot of people want to vacation here as well, and the surrounding areas. We thought this was a great time, we probably would have been here sooner if not for the pandemic.”

Once in Vegas, passengers can catch connecting flights on Spirit to more than 40 other locations – and travelers can fly to Albuquerque from those destinations too.

“We view Albuquerque as a destination as well, people who want the great outdoors,” Kirby said. “And that’s become even more prevalent post-pandemic, so we’re very excited about the traffic both in and out of Albuquerque.”

Officials with the Sunport told KOB 4 that adding another airline is just another example of how things are starting to return to normal since the pandemic hit more than two years ago.

“What we do see is that we’ve got New Mexicans that are wanting to travel and we’ve got lots of people that are wanting to travel to New Mexico, so we’re only going to go up from here,” said Lisa Leyva, the development manager at the Sunport.

Spirit will now be the eighth airline to call the Sunport home – after the airport lost Allegiant Airlines earlier this year.

“Anytime we have more flights and more competition or routes, then that drives down prices, it creates more of the demand that we want in order to keep prices where we’d like to see them,” Leyva said.