Air travelers will have two new options at the Portland International Jetport during Maine’s peak tourism season.

Southwest Airlines will start weekly nonstop flights to Nashville, Tennessee, in early June. The Saturday-only service adds to the airline’s flights to Baltimore and Chicago’s Midway International Airport.

The Nashville flights put a check mark next to the airport’s No. 2 unserved market, Assistant Airport Director Zach Sundquist said in a news release.

“We are always looking at our top unserved markets and working to find partners to provide nonstop service to those markets,” he said.

JetBlue Airways will start daily nonstop flights to New York’s LaGuardia Airport in July. That route adds to the airline’s existing service to New York’s JFK Airport.

JetBlue suspended its year-round service to New York City in 2019 as part of a broader route restructuring. The airline’s new LaGuardia service will be in the summer only for now, Sundquist said in an email.

United, Delta, American and Frontier airlines launched new summer flights from the West and Midwest to Portland last spring. The changes were an attempt to pick up leisure air travelers amid a downturn in business travel during the pandemic.

It is unclear if those flights will return again in 2022. The new routes were announced last winter and the jetport expects resumption of those flights would be on a similar timeline if the airlines elect to to keep them going, Sundquist said.


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