Heads up, budget travelers: Starting June 2, Seattle Paine Field International Airport will add three new routes from Frontier Airlines, which will fly to Denver, Las Vegas and Phoenix thrice weekly.
The new routes, announced Tuesday morning at Paine Field, connect the Everett airport to Denver International Airport (where Frontier is headquartered), Harry Reid International Airport in Las Vegas and Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport.
The budget airline will debut one-way flights as cheap as $29 and $39.
Brett Smith, CEO of Propeller Airports (operator of Paine Field Passenger Terminal), said Tuesday that the three new Frontier routes could lead to an increase of 100,000 annual travelers coming in and out of Everett.
“It’s gonna be nine [additional] flights a week and so about 4,000 total passengers [more per week],” Smith said, and “we can absolutely handle that [uptick] now without any issues. At some point, this will expand to accommodate the congestion that’s gone on and the continued growth.”
Smith said the airport has not yet returned to the number of travelers it saw before the pandemic, but Tuesday’s news reflects Paine Field working its way back to that pre-2020 capacity.
“We were doing 3,000 passengers a day” before the coronavirus pandemic, Smith said. With the new routes, “it’s gonna be 1,500, 1,600 a day, so we’re ramping back up.”
The three additional routes will bring Paine Field to nine routes in total, flown by 80 planes per week. Referring to the new Airbus jets that Frontier will fly as “pretty big,” Smith said these new routes are a milestone for the airport.
“In 2018, when we were building, and 2019 when we opened, those were the two most exciting years of my career, so it was very demoralizing to see a bustling terminal go down to what it was,” Smith said, referring again to the pandemic. “But our staff hung in there, we did whatever we had to and we’re coming out of this stronger and better. We’re fully committed to continuing to fund this as it grows.”
Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated that Propeller Airports operates Paine Field; it operates Paine Field Passenger Terminal.
Chase Hutchinson: chase.hutchinson.writer@gmail.com.