From Newsday
Frontier Airlines will continue serving Long Island MacArthur Airport for at least another year.
The Islip Town Board held a public hearing on the new contract with the low-cost airline at its Sept. 24 board meeting, though there were no public speakers. The board then voted unanimously 3-0 in favor of renewing the Frontier contract. Board members Trish Bergin Weichbrodt and James P. O’Connor were absent from the meeting.
“Frontier’s decision to focus on Long Island reflects the enthusiasm we are seeing from Nassau and Suffolk County travelers,” Islip Supervisor Angie Carpenter said in an emailed statement. “We are delighted that Frontier Airlines has chosen to be part of the Long Island MacArthur Airport family.”
The contract can be renewed for additional yearlong periods over the next four years “with fees that are consistent and set by the Airport’s Signatory Rates with annual rent increases for rates and charges,” according to the resolution.
The new contract doesn’t specify the rates the Denver-based airline will pay the town because “the rates of what they actually pay are based on the number of passengers that book the tickets. The fees are made up of security fee, baggage claim fee, west concourse fee, and they’re all ‘per-passenger’ fees, for example,” town spokeswoman Caroline Smith said in an email. She did not respond to an inquiry about the amount the town earned from the last contract with Frontier.
A representative for Frontier declined to comment on the renewed contract.
This past summer, the airline announced it would add 38 round-trip flights a week from the Ronkonkoma airport, including daily service to the snowbird destinations of Tampa, West Palm Beach and Fort Myers in Florida. The additional flights are set to launch in November and are scheduled through March 2020, after which Frontier said it will assess service patterns for future flight offerings.
Frontier flies to eight destinations from MacArthur. Last year, the airline represented about 33% of total passengers at MacArthur, or more than 536,000 round-trip passengers out of the 1.6 million round-trip passengers that used the airport in 2018, according to airport officials.