Airports? (Salt Lake City, St. George, Cedar City: live in, prices, airport)

[lghoppel]

Seems like you have to fly out of Vegas to go most places.
Which could be annoying considering the long drive (or great if you spend an extra day in Vegas ).

Is the St. George airport expanding? Are there any flights that really make sense from St. George or should one assume to just always use the Vegas airport?

[cedarite]

We live in Cedar City, but the same situation applies. Usually we compare prices for flights. Sometimes we save $500 or more by driving to Las Vegas- we park at a friend's house. There are also shuttle services to and from the Las Vegas airport from St. George. Once in awhile if we're headed to the right location, the prices are comparable and we'll use the local airports. When Mesa had a connector flight out of Cedar City to Las Vegas, this happened much more frequently, but Skywest is based out of St. George so an aggressive complaints campaign was waged to get rid of Mesa. Since Cedar City airport allows only for Delta connections via the single destination of Salt Lake City, we almost never use it. I think we have used the St. George airport once. St. George is adding a once a day flight to Phoenix this fall. I guess it all depends on where you need to go.

[HikeSG]

There are three direct flight options now including the new Phoenix option: Salt Lake City, Denver, and soon Phoenix. Looking at price you are usually better off driving (or catching a $25 shuttle) to Vegas if you are going anywhere else. You can catch connecting flights to just about anywhere though if you don't want to drive.

[lghoppel]

Thanks!

[poopskooper]

Once in awhile, you can piece together a series of flights at a good cost without going into Vegas if you don't mind making some connections. Several years ago, we were able to fly out of St. George to NYC by making one connection in Denver and it actually was cheaper than taking a non-stop from Vegas. The flying time was several hours longer but offset a bit by the time we would have spent going into Vegas.

I think in the future, the options will be much better going forward pertaining to flying out of St. George. They just made a subtle name-change last year from "municipal" to "regional" (it's now called "St. George Regional Airport") in preparation for expanding services a bit.

Also, when we lived in Mesquite, there was talk of building a huge regional (and possibly an international) airport just outside the city to help ease congestion at McCarran and to also serve southern Utah. Once the recession hit, I haven't heard much about it. I guess it's been scrapped but once the economy fully recovers, perhaps that may be an option someday too.

[markg91359]

Originally Posted by poopskooper

Once in awhile, you can piece together a series of flights at a good cost without going into Vegas if you don't mind making some connections. Several years ago, we were able to fly out of St. George to NYC by making one connection in Denver and it actually was cheaper than taking a non-stop from Vegas. The flying time was several hours longer but offset a bit by the time we would have spent going into Vegas.

I think in the future, the options will be much better going forward pertaining to flying out of St. George. They just made a subtle name-change last year from "municipal" to "regional" (it's now called "St. George Regional Airport") in preparation for expanding services a bit.

Also, when we lived in Mesquite, there was talk of building a huge regional (and possibly an international) airport just outside the city to help ease congestion at McCarran and to also serve southern Utah. Once the recession hit, I haven't heard much about it. I guess it's been scrapped but once the economy fully recovers, perhaps that may be an option someday too.

St. George doesn't have better passenger air service for two reasons:

1. Its not that far from the airport in Las Vegas; and

2. The population base in St. George, while getting bigger, is not big enough to support many commercial air flights.

You can get a shuttle from St. George to the Las Vegas airport for $25 each way per passenger. Its not a short trip, but its not an insanely long one either. Its a little over a 100 miles on I-15.

What's kind of amusing to me is that even if you live in the St. George area the trip out to the new airport is not a short or easy one. I believe its about ten miles from the freeway exit off I-15.

[poopskooper]

Originally Posted by markg91359

St. George doesn't have better passenger air service for two reasons:

1. Its not that far from the airport in Las Vegas; and

2. The population base in St. George, while getting bigger, is not big enough to support many commercial air flights.

You can get a shuttle from St. George to the Las Vegas airport for $25 each way per passenger. Its not a short trip, but its not an insanely long one either. Its a little over a 100 miles on I-15.

What's kind of amusing to me is that even if you live in the St. George area the trip out to the new airport is not a short or easy one. I believe its about ten miles from the freeway exit off I-15.

Good grief. My apologies everybody. Disregard my post as I forgot that there's a new airport. As I was writing the post last night, in my mind I was picturing the old airport on the bluff. That's the only one we know of as we've never been to the new airport. DH reminded me that it was a SkyWest flight we caught to SLC and then flew east from there. Again, at the time, it was substantially cheaper than flying out of McCarran on a non-stop flight. This was way over a decade ago so I shouldn't have been contributing to this thread in the first place. My apologies.
~amanda