From Las Vegas, Allegiant crews prepare for Hurricane Milton’s wrath

In a darkened room on Allegiant Travel Co.’s Summerlin campus, dozens of Allegiant Air employees have been working all week to prepare for Thursday’s arrival of Hurricane Milton, a disaster that could be the worst in a series of storms that have pummeled Florida’s Gulf Coast.

Meteorologists, planners and route supervisors gathered in Allegiant’s Operations Control Center to map out how to get Allegiant’s jet fleet — and its flight crews and ground operations workers — out of the storm’s path.

While Allegiant is headquartered in Las Vegas, a major portion of its business is centered around Florida resort cities where the airline flies from a number of East Coast and midwestern cities to 12 Florida destinations.

Florida — specifically Punta Gorda, near Fort Myers — also is home to Allegiant’s Sunseeker resort on Charlotte Harbor, a less-than-year-old 500-room hotel with more than 180 extended-stay suites, as well as bars, restaurants and conference space.

New CEO

Greg Anderson, who has held the title of Allegiant CEO for just over a month, encouraged workers as they poured over data showing the status of its route network with maps illustrating where every Allegiant Airbus jet was in the air.

“We have aircraft based in (St. Petersburg), in Sarasota and Punta Gorda,” Anderson said during a Monday tour of the control center. “Proactively we’ll stop all flying after Tuesday just depending on the timing of where the hurricane will hit, but for this example we’re going to cancel all those flights, we’re going to reposition those aircraft, move them up out of harm’s way, maybe into the Midwest like Cincinnati or one of our bases up there. We’re working in advance with our crews, our team members that are out in those areas. We offer repositioning flights for them to board and fly out as well. So it’s really a coordinated effort that our team, days in advance, is working through to make sure that we’re proactive in avoiding and mitigating the damage that’s caused by some of these hurricanes.”

Preparations also are underway for Sunseeker, which is right on the water. The first-of-its-kind resort for Allegiant has faced hard luck from the start.

Sunseeker’s opening was delayed around six months to December 2023 by the COVID-19 pandemic. Then, it was struck by hurricane after hurricane. The company calculated $35 million in damage from Hurricane Ian in December 2022 before the resort even opened. Since then, it’s been broadsided by Hurricane Idalia in August 2023 and Helene weeks ago.

Storm surge damage

Anderson said the biggest concern for Sunseeker is the danger of storm surge when salty gulf waters spread inland.

“We’re battening down the hatches to prepare for it, I think is the best way to say it,” Anderson said.

Sunseeker has been cleared out and preparations have been made to protect the resort as much as possible.

“What they’ve been able to do though is there’s protective items, barriers, everything that you put up days in advance to clear out the resort. You put these up to help protect from any of the storm surge or water that comes through.

“With this one with the wind, we’ll see if that, how impactful that may be depending on where it comes over, but the last three hurricanes really the, it’s been impacted by more of the storm surge. In fact, in Helene, there was a lot more water coming over the sides than even Idalia.”

There are more than 600 employees at Sunseeker and more than 2,500 in Florida base operations, including Clearwater, serving Tampa Bay and St. Petersburg, two airports in Orlando and others in Fort Myers, Key West, Sarasota and Jacksonville among the 12.

Helping Asheville

The damage from Helene didn’t stop at Florida. Anderson described how the airline helped crew members in Asheville, North Carolina, affected by that storm.

“Eight percent of our capacity right now has been in and out of Asheville. And you know, it’s been just the destruction that’s happened there has just been heartbreaking. And we’re doing everything we can to support our crews,” he said.

“In fact, we’ve had rescue flights for our team members in Asheville where they could go down and stay at Sunseeker, for example, if they and their families if they so chose to do. There’s a lot that happens when these hurricanes come through. It’s just about being prepared and communicating and really trying to be as proactive as you can to mitigate the impacts that can come from them.”