Sun Country Airlines in March will stop transporting mail for the U.S. Postal Service to focus its resources on its faster growing businesses.
The Minneapolis-based leisure carrier's business with USPS has been declining and becoming less profitable. The share of its operations devoted to carrying mail is tiny at just 0.1% of the company's overall revenue, said Greg Mays, the airline's chief operating officer.
"We've grown [our]business pretty significantly over the years so it's a smaller and smaller percentage of total revenues," Mays said.
It also reflects a shift in strategy by the federal postal service. In an email, Sue Brennan, a spokeswoman for the agency, said it has been moving higher volumes of mail through its surface — or land transportation — network as part of a plan for the postal service to be self-sustaining.
The 17 Sun Country employees involved in postal service mail transport will be moved into other roles as the airline focuses on its three core businesses: scheduled airline service, charters and cargo, particularly for Amazon.
Sun Country has a workforce of nearly 2,500.
March 3 will be Sun Country's last day transporting USPS mail and freight.
In November, Sun Country announced a major expansion of its commercial network, with more than a dozen new nonstop routes from Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport this year, including to Atlantic City, Colorado Springs, Louisville and New York. Including those routes, Sun Country operates 120 routes serving more than 90 airports.
