Allegiant ends some Fort Lauderdale spokes

Allegiant Air likes to pick obscure kinds of places and link them with hot spots like Las Vegas or Fort Lauderdale, Fla. It began service to the Florida city last November but has decided that some of its new routes just aren't making money. It said it will end flights September 7 between FLL and: Allentown/Bethlehem/Easton, Penn.; Chattanooga, Tenn.; Greensboro, N.C.; Huntington, W.Va., and the Tri-Cities, Tenn., airport. The last two would have seemed natural choices, with almost no service anywhere and certainly none to Florida. Allegiant will still link Orlando Sanford with the Tri-Cities, which are Kingsport, Bristol, and Johnson City, Tenn; from Huntington, which dubs itself the TriState Airport (West Virginia, Kentucky, and Ohio), it will also still serve Sanford. Allegiant accounted for more than half of Huntingdon's 8,000 boardings in June, the airport's highest levels in over 13 years. And at Lehigh Valley, Pa., the ABE airport, Allegiant increased boardings by some 120% between 2006 and 2007. So you have to wonder: maybe it's the FLL minihub, not the spokes, that's the problem.