Azul Starts Year-Round Service Between its Belo Horizonte Hub and Fort Lauderdale

Azul, Brazil’s third-largest airline, started this week a year-round service connecting its hub in Belo Horizonte/Confins Airport to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, as announced in August. The flights are set to operate three times a week, on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.

This service is Azul’s second route between Confins and the United States, following Orlando, started in 2017, and will be operated by the airline’s Airbus A330-200s, with 20 seats in Business Xtra, 100 in Economy Xtra and 152 in Economy class.

The new operation was celebrated with an event in Confins, which is Azul’s second-largest hub in Brazil, with the presence of BH Airports — the airport manager — president Marcos Brandão and Azul’s Vice-President for People and Customers, Jason Ward, which praised the connectivity at Confins.

“Now we have daily flights [from Confins to the U.S.] and we are serving more than 40 cities nonstop here, with almost 100 flights a day. All this feeding with regional flights and other domestic [flights] gives us big hope on the success of this flight,” reported Ward to Diário do Comércio.

Indeed, apart from the sheer demand between the Belo Horizonte and Fort Lauderdale/Miami regions, connections will play a huge role in filling seats. By far, Florida is the state with the highest number of Brazilian expatriates from all over the country.

Additionally, Fort Lauderdale will count with connections to other United States and Caribbean destinations, as Azul has codeshare agreements with JetBlue and United, plus an interline agreement with Florida-based regional carrier Silver Airways.

With the Brazilian economy finally recovering steadily since 2018, after a huge recession that pushed the dollar up and the demand to the U.S. down, Azul expects a good 2020. In a recent press presentation, the airline said it will announce a new international destination soon, the first since Lisbon in 2016.

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João Machado

João has loved aviation since he was six-years-old when he started visiting his home airport in Porto Alegre, southern Brazil. As he always loved writing, in 2011, at age 10 he started his very own aviation blog. Many things have happened since then, and now he is putting all his efforts into being an airline executive in the future. João currently lives in Siena, Italy, where he studies Economics and Management at Unisi.

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