Hey y’all, some of you know me as one of the Discord moderators. Going to attempt to write a trip report, we’ll see how this goes.
As some of you may know, I live around the Phoenix area but I am originally from Texas, so Phoenix to Houston is my most flown route. Back in November, I saw Allegiant was launching flights between AZA (Phoenix-Mesa Gateway) and Houston Hobby. I booked myself on the first flight for a few reasons: 1st, it would be my first inaugural flight. 2nd, AZA is much closer to my living situation than PHX is, 3rd, I wanted to try Allegiant just to see what it was like. I hadn’t really heard much about Allegiant other than the fact that they were just another ULCC similar to Frontier, which I had flown before.
Anyway the inaugural flight was on February 11th departing at 6AM, so naturally I went to bed at midnight at woke up around 3:30 and made my way towards AZA, getting there around 4:15. I usually try to arrive around 90 minutes prior to departure for most flights, and being so early in the morning, traffic was light and I made it earlier than I was planning. I made my way through security and here is where the pictures start so y’all don’t have to listen to my rambling anymore.
I didn’t realize AZA had this nice outside area which I would have used if it wasn’t cold, although I probably wouldn’t want to be out here in the daytime in the summer heat. My gate was in a separate building, you can see it on the left edge of this picture.
I made my way to the gate where they were serving coffee and pastries from the panera bread inside the terminal. I grabbed one of the pastries but passed on the coffee. They had balloons and goodies set up, and I grabbed a water bottle as my little souvenir of the trip, a picture of which is below.
Eventually it was time to board, which is done by airstairs at AZA. Airstairs seem to be quite rare here in the US, at least at the airports I usually fly to and from. Before this trip, I believe the last time I boarded by stairs was probably around 2012. Our ride to Hobby today was N247NV, a 3 year-old A320 delivered new to Allegiant.
My view out of seat 8A:
Coming up is my attempt at a cabin review. I thought legroom was ok, especially for the length of our flight (around 2 hours in the air). I wouldn’t want to sit in these seats for much longer than that. One thing to note, I’m on the shorter side at 5ft 8in (around 173cm). The seats seemed to be the same ones I had on Frontier a few years ago with the useless tray table size. There was some kind of stain on the sit next to me but I wasn’t bothered that much, the plane seemed clean overall and my seat was fine. It also helped that our flight was fairly empty, there were around 45-50 passengers on board.
Eventually we took off, and I tried to get some sleep but I have a hard time sleeping in anything that moves, be it a car or a plane or a train, etc. so I just stayed awake the whole time. Eventually the sun came up somewhere over New Mexico so I just watched the sunrise. I would have watched a movie on my phone, but I forgot to download one and Allegiant doesn’t offer any kind of IFE. Although there was a buy-on-board service, I didn’t partake because I bought a water bottle at the airport and had that pastry.
I also saw some interesting cloud formations, I’m not sure what caused them but I wouldn’t doubt they had something to do with the winter storm that hit a few days later.
Eventually we made our descent and landing into Houston, after a few more personal firsts. We were put into a hold over the Victoria, Texas area, with the pilot saying in the announcement air traffic was bad in Houston so they just needed to clear it out a bit. After holding for 10 minutes or so, we headed towards Hobby where we performed a missed approach, which was another first for me. The weather in Houston was overcast, and the missed approach was performed before we broke out of the clouds. The pilot announced it as ATC got us too close to a plane in front of us, and we landed safely around 10 minutes after that.
In conclusion, it was a fun experience being on an inaugural flight, though I’m not quite sure if I recommend Allegiant. The ticket was marginally cheaper than what it would have cost me on Southwest or United, there’s no IFE and service was somewhat limited with nothing complimentary. I would fly them again on shorter routes if it was convenient, such as Phoenix to Las Vegas, but I wouldn’t go out of my way to fly them. However, they were quite flexible on changing flights, which I had to due twice on my return leg due to the winter storm that hit Texas.
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