About 10% of this is venting since I had an award reservation cancelled due to AA postponing their resumption of MIA-MGA, but this is more of a long time brewing question.

I've been wanting to visit Granada, Ometepe, and León for a long time, so I've monitored flights for probably the past 7-8 years. Managua (other than sometimes Roatán) is always the most expensive Central American airport to fly into by far. Whenever there are sales and SAP is $280 RT from Denver, MGA is $600 or more. I can normally get to PTY or LIR for less than $350 RT on multiple airlines, but not MGA.

Now in a "post"-Covid world, all of the flights on UA, DL, and AA have resumed to Central America. That is, except flights to MGA where no American carriers are flying there except for Spirit (and no thank you). The only non-stop flight there is on AV from MIA.

So my question is really, what gives? According to the Oracle, Wikipedia, the last time it had compiled results for all of the CA airports, MGA was the 5th busiest, busier than SAP, LIR, and BZE, so I don't think it's necessarily just "demand". And if it's busier than those airports, why are the flights to the others so much cheaper? And it's not like the demand isn't coming from the U.S., where the most traveled routes, again, according to Wikipedia, are MIA and IAH.

I mean, just looking at avianca.com:

Anybody have an idea what makes Managua so "special"?