At least in the US, airlines own the gates, not the airport. If you want a jetway and there isn’t one currently in place the airline foots the bill. When my company went to an all jet fleet there was a mad dash to install jetways at airports that were only served by turboprops previously. The company had them built elsewhere then driven in and installed.
At IAD, Atlantic Coast Airlines owned all the gates at the A terminal and a few at the B terminal. When they dumped their support of UAL and went on their own as Independance Air they were set with their own gates. UAL on the other hand had to replace the lost feed from ACA with other airlines but they didn’t have the gates since UAL didn’t own them.
Also it can be a operational limitation for the smaller operators. Not all jetways can drop as low as needed for the small jets and not all small jets have plug-type doors. Bombardier never created a plug-door mod. for the CRJ’s which leaves them with airstairs as their only option. Airstair aircraft can use a jetway with the addition of a ramp and some guard rails but it isn’t an ideal sitituation.
The first ERJ’s only had airstairs but our own engineering department created a plug-door mod back in 1998. That mod was then sold to Embraer and every future delivery we took had plug-doors. Other carriers could then opt for the plug door as well. The airports we service have slowly adding jetways so now nearly every destination we go to has them. In fact they just finished a large upgrade in EWR which eliminated every hard stand gate we use to have.
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