Viva Aerobus and Allegiant Air are pushing for a joint venture covering flights between the United States and Mexico. The planned alliance promises to deliver big results that have never been seen before among low-cost carriers in North America. In making their case to the United States Department of Transportation (DOT), Allegiant and Viva Aerobus highlighted how they planned to become the largest low-cost option between the US and Mexico and add routes to destinations they believe are uniquely positioned to offer.
Complementary route networks
Allegiant Air is currently an entirely-domestic airline, with no scheduled flights to Mexico. Targeting some Canadian passengers, the airline does fly to border towns in the US like Bellingham and Plattsburgh to serve trans-border customers willing to catch a low-cost flight to popular vacation destinations.
Viva Aerobus does serve transborder routes. It has a healthy domestic network within Mexico, but it is one of the more sizable low-cost carriers in the market. The airline serves some of the bigger points in the US too, like Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and Chicago, and some secondary destinations like Cincinnati and Nashville. Its network is oriented toward leisure and visiting friends and relatives (VFR) traffic.
This sets the two airlines up to work well together. With no overlapping routes, the two carriers are not at risk of consolidating or reducing transborder routes, as is a concern raised in other joint ventures.
A difficult market for Viva Aerobus
For Viva Aerobus, getting US-originating leisure traffic has been difficult. Viva and Allegiant submitted data since 2014 for its Cancun-bound routes from the United States. The airline has tried several different routes from the US, such as New York, Charlotte, and Houston to…