PHL has more flights this year but lost some low-cost routes

More airplanes are scheduled to take off from Philadelphia International Airport this year than in 2024 — but travelers on a budget may find fewer options for low-cost flights.

PHL has 146,075 flights scheduled to take off this year, an increase of 2.9% from last year, according to airport spokesperson Heather Redfern. Those include trips using the American Airlines bus program that shuttles passengers between PHL and nearby airports.

But trips on low-cost airlines make up a smaller share of those flights, as Spirit Airlines and Frontier Airlines contend with business challenges.

While the total number of departing flights has grown at PHL this year, the number of total seats on flights out of the airport is down by 0.7%, Redfern said. PHL saw 30.9 million passengers travel through the airport last year — including arrivals and departures — and that number is projected to stay roughly the same for 2025, said Redfern.

In 2024, low-cost airlines Spirit and Frontier accounted for nearly 13% of flights from PHL, compared to just over 9% this year, said Redfern.

The airlines have “high average seats per departure,” said Redfern, so a decrease in these “high-density flights” will impact the airport’s average seat count. In 2024 the average flight departing from PHL had 133 seats, while this year that number is 129.

Low-cost airlines have seen rising costs and increasing competition — not just from each other, but also from larger airlines that adopted their business strategies, the New York Times reported this month.

Spirit, which has filed for bankruptcy twice in the last year, had 1,500 fewer flights scheduled out of PHL in 2025 compared to 2024, according to data from Cirium, an aviation analytics firm.

Spirit leadership last month announced a plan to furlough 1,800 flight attendants and has considered selling airplanes.

Frontier last year saw its first full year of profit since 2019. The airline removed 2,760 flights out of PHL this year, according to Cirium.

“Nationwide, it was a year of change for the ultra-low-cost carriers, and Philadelphia is no exception,” said PHL’s chief commercial officer, Kate Sullivan.

» READ MORE: READ MORE: How Philly-area residents are saving money on summer vacations

Some of PHL’s busiest airlines canceled entire routes out of Philadelphia in 2025 that they had previously offered. They include:

Some routes are also flying less frequently, including trips to LaGuardia; Washington, D.C.; Charlotte, N.C.; Boston; Detroit; and Houston.

Redfern said these kinds of changes in flight schedules are a “normal part of airline network planning,” adding that the airport is “encouraged by growth in several destinations.”

“The continued investment from our airline partners demonstrates confidence in the strength of the Philadelphia market and the opportunities it offers for both business and leisure travel,” she said.

Meanwhile, PHL has added new destinations in the last year. Those include:

American Airlines, which is the largest carrier out of PHL, added 6,012 flights in 2025. In addition to the new destinations above, it also added flights to Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, and bus service to Trenton-Mercer.

Frontier, which is the second largest airline at PHL in terms of the number of passengers, added four new flights this year to Austin, Texas; Houston; and Los Angeles as well as the new Santiago, Dominican Republic, route.

Among destinations that see at least 1,000 flights a year from PHL, airlines made the most additions to their flight offerings from PHL to Dulles, Va.; San Francisco; Harrisburg; Fort Lauderdale, Fla.; and Richmond, Va., which collectively saw nearly 2,000 additional flights this year.

Meanwhile, PHL continues to rank last for traveler satisfaction in J.D. Power’s airport survey. The airport’s aging infrastructure is largely to blame, according to J.D. Power, and isn’t built to accommodate the number of passengers that fly through the airport these days.

“PHL turned 85 this year, and admittedly in some places, we look our age,” Atif Saeed, CEO of Philadelphia’s Department of Aviation, said last month. “It is one of the reasons that despite many innovations, we don’t rank high on J.D. Power’s annual listing.”