Spirit is launching a new daily service to New York, Newark, New Jersey and Indianapolis on Thursday.
Last week, the airline also started service to Nashville International Airport.
The ultra low-cost carrier has added more new passengers in fiscal year 2019 than any other airline at TPA. With the new connections, Spirit will now serve 24 destinations from Tampa.
TPA has served a record 22.2 million passengers for fiscal year 2019 and Spirit has been responsible for nearly 40 percent of the passenger growth, or 437,000 passengers.
The airline's presence in Tampa Bay is also extending, with the announcement of a new partnership with ZooTampa.
Spirit will be the presenting sponsor of the updated Macaw Flyover. The flyover now has a new, longer flight path for the birds and more macaws in the exhibit.
Spirit Chief Commercial Officer Matt Klein on Spirit's plans for the Tampa Bay market:
On Spirit's growth in Tampa: We are about 25 percent larger this year than we were last year in our seat capacity. We peak out at 29 departures per day on our busiest days from here.
The Tampa has been growing overall. We have been 40 percent of new growth of customers at the airport. It's been a great partnership.
Generally speaking, we run one flight a day. Tampa itself is giving us a lot of thoughts on opportunities in the future here in terms of how much more we can do. When you are more than a destination like Tampa is becoming, you can support more flights year round and not just seasonal.
On determining what routes would work for Tampa: In the New York metro area we added service from Newark as well as LaGuardia Airport. Those by themselves tell you how we view Tampa. We would like to do more. When we come from larger cities, it's natural people want to come to Tampa.
We started the Nashville service and earlier this year added San Juan. Puerto Rico overall has been a really good market for us and Tampa feeding into Puerto Rico seemed like a fit.
Our product allows us to be successful in certain kinds of routes that other airlines may not be able to find the same path of success in.
We are looking for two main things pieces to the decision, if there is a natural affinity between city A and city B and if cities are being served by somebody else that fares seem to be too high.
It's our obligation to grow markets, grow routes. We just don't take market share, that's not what we do. What we do is make the market bigger overall. When fares are too high, there aren't enough seats.
On getting into large markets: In some airports they are constrained. There's not as many gates available and in some cases no gates available. Or in the case of New York's LaGuardia Airport, it's what is called slot control.
You can only have so many takeoff and landing slots we have access to. We have to make highly prioritized decisions. It's a highly sought after asset.
Here at the Tampa airport, we work closely with them and there's still room for growth here. We utilize our assets, gates as much as we can and we have more seats on airplanes than what most other airlines have and that allows us to spread our cost over more seats and lower fares.
On types of travelers for us, we are primarily a leisure airline for vacationers and people visiting friends and family.
We do care about business travelers and see more so small business owners and not large corporations. We have a big front seat product that's good for someone who is on a business trip.
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