I thought SWA flew to IAD for its Washington service, not DCA?
EDIT: The FNT service… that has to be a direct jab at FFT, with them to discontinue service to there. If they do it, and SWA starts up a FNT-DEN route, that’s really going to sting.
WN does fly to IAD; should have said Washington DC was already a WN city.
My gut feeling is that for the transition from AirTran to Southwest, there will be tweaking of schedules but no or very minor route additions. AirTran flights out of Flint currently go to ATL and Florida; Southwest will probably keep these routes but not add more.
I’m surprised to see that EYW is being kept on the route system.
It doesn’t interfere - VOI doesn’t operate any of the routes from MEX that they will be operating.
They won’t be able to do 20 minute turns at the international stations. They don’t do 20 minute turns at a lot of stations as it is (imagine only scheduling 20 mins on the ground at LGA).
The average turn seems to be 25 to 30 minutes, especially at the larger stations.
VOI flies to Licenciado Adolfo López Mateos International Airport (Toluca) while AirTran will be flying to Benito Juárez International Airport (Mexico City)
I’m surprised that Southwest will be ceasing Air Tran service to/from White Plains/Westchester County (HPN). It would have been a good way to wage a good fight against a jetBlue stronghold.
Southwest isn’t particularly interested in waging battles anymore unless it’s against weak competition like Frontier as they’re no longer really in a position from a cost perspective to do so.
White Plains is also a really weird airport from a pricing/yield perspective - to certain (primarily business) markets it is high yielding but to others (particularly Florida) yields aren’t any better than other NYC airports. In other circumstances, you can actually find much cheaper connecting itineraries from HPN than you can other NYC airports.
I’m guessing that HPN-ATL just didn’t perform that well from a load perspective (especially if WN is going to de-emphasize ATL as a “hub” and make it more O&D based) and that the Florida markets were weak from a yield perspective. According to FA Airline Insight FL just averaged a 74% load on HPN-ATL on the 717. That’s pretty poor, especially when you consider that the median fare for that period was only $134.
The cities I listed are ones that Southwest won’t be keeping after the merger. Bloomington, Atlantic City, and other cities will be discontinued before the merger is complete.
