Allegiant Air pilots are citing low pay, quality-of-life concessions, and the airline’s costly side ventures as key concerns.
Pilots from ultra-low-cost airline Allegiant Air held informational picketing in 22 cities across the country Wednesday. The pilots, represented by the Teamsters union, have been in negotiations for a new labor contract and have grown frustrated with the pace of negotiations.
“Allegiant executives have spent years throwing away money on one failed venture after another while the pilots who keep this airline flying still don’t have the respect they deserve,” said Teamsters general president Sean M. O’Brien. “The company is clinging to concessionary demands, delaying progress, and gambling with the future of an airline built on the hard work of its pilots. Allegiant needs to abandon these reckless priorities and return to the table with a serious proposal that reflects industry standards.”
The union says the current contract proposal seeks quality of life concessions, impacts pilot seniority, weakens scheduling protections, and pays the airline’s pilots significantly less than pilots at competing airlines.
The union also claimed the airline “continues to pour millions of dollars into failed resorts, stadium deals, and entertainment ventures,” while asking pilots for pay cuts and other concessions. Pilots pointed to a 50% collapse in the company’s market value in six months, and money sunk into unrelated ventures like a since-shuttered NASCAR racing team and a stadium naming deal in Las Vegas.
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Allegiant opened the Sunseeker Resort on Florida’s Gulf Coast in 2023 after years of COVID-related construction delays. The resort, originally projected to cost the company $500 million, ultimately cost $720 million, and impacted the company’s financial performance when expected bookings didn’t materialize at profitable levels. Allegiant sold the resort to Blackstone Real Estate in June 2025.
The union cited these financial drains, plus trips by Allegiant executives to visit pilot bases earlier this year in private jets, as leading to a vote of no confidence in Allegiant’s management in August.
“Flying fancy private jets around the country to meet with pilots—just to tell them that you ‘can’t afford’ a new contract is a level of tone-deaf arrogance the industry hasn’t seen since Frank Lorenzo’s Eastern Airlines disaster in the 1990s,” the union quoted a member as saying.
Allegiant pilots voted 97% in favor of a strike in a vote taken in November 2024, after contract renewal talks had dragged on for several years. The current contract was ratified in 2016 and became amendable in 2021, but the union and the airline have failed to reach an agreement on a new contract. New pilots earn about $50,000 in their first year working at Allegiant, compared to regional pilots—who typically have similar backgrounds and experience, but fly smaller aircraft—and average $100,000 in their first year.
Allegiant told Reuters that its current offer to the union includes a 50% average increase in hourly wages, which will rise to 70% over the life of the contract. Allegiant said it had also offered similar increases in contributions to pilot retirement benefit plans. The union says the increases are insufficient, and the company hasn’t addressed their concerns about schedule flexibility and predictable days off.
Airline workers are covered by the Railway Labor Act (RLA), which prevents labor contracts from fully expiring. Instead, they become amenable, but both management and workers are prohibited from taking any strike or lockout actions until talks have been declared at an impasse by labor regulators. The two sides are in the mediation process with the National Mediation Board, and in April, the union requested to be released from the mediation process, citing a lack of progress in negotiations, but no release has yet been granted.
The union represents more than 1,400 Allegiant Air pilots at 22 bases, including Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Nashville, Indianapolis, and Pittsburgh. The carrier also has pilot bases in smaller cities in Florida, Tennessee, Georgia, Washington, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Arizona.
Allegiant last posted an annual profit in 2022, and its last profitable quarter was the fourth quarter of 2024. For the nine months ended September 30, Allegiant posted a net loss of $76.6 million.
