Say what you want about the discount airlines, but Frontier and Spirit played a big part in a record-breaking year for Tampa International Airport.
Yesterday, TIA shared numbers from its fiscal year, and things are looking way up.
"The numbers are in, and we're shattering records," officials wrote on Twitter. "In fiscal year 2018, we served 21,013,788 passengers — a 9.3 percent increase over last year."
According to a release from TIA, an 83-percent increase in Frontier Airlines passengers happened after the carrier added 13 new routes in the past year, while Spirit Airlines added eight new nonstop routes, generating a 45.5 percent increase in Spirit passenger traffic. The airport also enjoyed its busiest Spring Break on record.
The news comes just a few days after Tampa International landed at No. 5 in Condé Nast Traveler's 2018 Readers' Choice Awards survey.
"Tampa's airport has long felt like a vision of the future from 50 years ago — because it was. But thanks to a current two-phase expansion project (the first of which, about $1 billion worth of upgrades, is just about done) TPA is poised to jet into this century and beyond," Condé Nast Traveler wrote.
This article appears in Oct 11-18, 2018.