Airtran Starts Pit-Mco and Phl-Rsw in Jan and Feb

[ChairPrefRes]

Looks like another assault on U''s bread and butter...The only proven way to shrink is into oblivion...U better decide where to make a stand before there is nothing left to stand on...Having PHL PIT CLT or anything else does you no good if you drop out of FLA mkt...Thats one of the destinations people are still flying to...Our Fla flights are already full for the holidays...

 

[ClueByFour]

It is suprising to see Airtran taking another non-ATL shot at PIT. Of course, 1x daily to MCO ain't much.....

And it's a leisure market. Maybe it's not such a bad idea after all....

 

[PHL]

[blockquote]
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On 10/16/2002 1:55:43 PM ChairPrefRes wrote:

Looks like another assault on U's bread and butter...The only proven way to shrink is into oblivion...U better decide where to make a stand before there is nothing left to stand on...Having PHL PIT CLT or anything else does you no good if you drop out of FLA mkt...Thats one of the destinations people are still flying to...Our Fla flights are already full for the holidays...
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[/blockquote]
A 757 full of people from PIT-MCO does NOT equal profit when the average one way fare is $129 (leisure travelers).

A 757 full of people from PIT-LAX DOES equal profit when the average one way fare is likely closer to $500 (business travelers).

Grow the long hauls at the expense of the less profitable routes.

 

[ChairPrefRes]

Under hub and spoke concept your going to have to have all types of revenue producing passengers to make it work...Some routes will probably always be money losers but they generate (hopefully enough revenue) to create demand at the feeder cities...If you choose to operate only profitable routes (example: drop fla) you'll never create enough demand to operate say ITH PIT LAX it just wont create enough pax for the feeders ...If SWA were forced to service all the cities U services (200+) with they're structure they would'nt last a week...So is it fair to say that all small markets should lose service because hub and spoke is dead...No The hub concept just has to be utilized more efficiently...Something thats novel to airlines up to now...But rolling hub concept might be an interesting attempt...

 

[TomBascom]

You need unprofitable routes like Florida in order to provide the variety that is such an important part of the Hub and Spoke picture. It's also an important outlet for dividend miles -- people fly a lot of those business routes in order to be able to take a trip to FL... and so forth. And if you turn FL flights into cattle cars that isn't going to help things either -- where am I going to spend my 80,000 mile F rewards if there is no F?

And $129 isn't all that far from break even.

 

[MiAAmi]

AA starting CLT-MIA service in December too