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Located across the water to the east of San Francisco, Oakland Airport (OAK) serves as a useful alternative for passengers traveling to and from the Bay Area in northern California. Despite this, recent years have seen traffic at the facility take a decline, with several airlines withdrawing service altogether.
This year, American ultra-low-cost carrier Allegiant Air will be the latest addition to the growing list of carriers that have chosen to leave Oakland Airport behind in the 2020s, with its operations at the facility set to come to an end in May. Using current and historical scheduling data made available by Cirium, an aviation analytics company, let’s take a closer look at when Allegiant Air’s Oakland operations will cease, and how they have changed.
Examining Allegiant Air’s Exit From Oakland
As reported this week by Aero Routes, Allegiant Air recently filed a series of schedule changes concerning its routes out of Las Vegas Harry Reid International Airport (LAS) and Oakland. At the former, Allegiant’s flights to Chattanooga (CHA) and Grand Forks (GFK) will cease on May 3, while May 25 will be the last day that Allegiant flies from Oakland to Bellingham (BLI). It has also cancelled its planned seasonal flights to Kalispell (FCA).
These changes mean that, once the Bellingham flights have ceased, Allegiant Air will no longer operate any scheduled services to or from Oakland. To this end, Matt Rodriguez, the Director of Aviation at Bellingham International Airport, explained to the Bellingham Herald that “over the past several months, Allegiant has eliminated multiple routes, (…) and Bellingham was the final remaining Allegiant route served from Oakland.” He adds that:
“The Bellingham–Oakland nonstop flight operated by Allegiant Air will be suspended effective May 25. (…) We’re certainly disappointed to see the Oakland service suspended, especially given how well the route has performed historically.”
Several Other Carriers Have Also Left Oakland In Recent Times
Allegiant Air’s untimely exit from Oakland Airport is emblematic of the issues that the struggling Californian facility has faced in recent years. Indeed, Cirium data shows that, using June as an example, traffic across the board is down by a factor of 14% year-on-year, with just 2,966 scheduled departures this time around compared to a grand total of 3,459 back in June of 2025. Allegiant is not the only carrier to have left Oakland, either.
2024 saw three high-profile departures, with Avianca, Azores Airlines, and Contour Aviation all calling it quits that year. Indeed, Avianca operated just 17 departures from Oakland to San Salvador (SAL) using the A320 in January of 2024, while Azores Airlines flew the same number of services to Terceira from June to September using Plus Ultra’s A330s. Contour Aviation, meanwhile, served Crescent City (CEC) 76 times using Embraer ERJs.
Things didn’t get better in 2025, with Sun Country Airlines departing after operating just 25 flights out of Oakland that year and 32 in 2024. However, the most significant departure arguably came in the form of the exit of Spirit Airlines, which also departed in 2025 after operating just 1,138 flights out of Oakland, compared to a grand total of 2,864 the year before. This represented a proportional year-on-year decrease of a whopping factor of 60.3%.
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17 Years Of Service
When Allegiant Air finally ceases to operate its flights in and out of Oakland in May this year, it will bring the curtain down on a 17-year spell at the Californian airport. According to Cirium, the American ultra-low-cost carrier first flew from Oakland in February of 2009, when it launched its services to Bellingham. These were followed later that year by the addition of a second route to Eugene (EUG), which first operated in June 2009.
Between these two routes, Allegiant Air operated a grand total of 191 departures out of Oakland in 2009, with this figure rising to 266 in 2010 and 286 in 2011 before ballooning to an impressive sum of 1,053 in 2012 as more routes were added. While traffic dropped in the following years, it picked up again in 2017, with an annual peak of 1,063 departures. The story since then, however, has been one of a gradual decline, and, now, it is almost over.
