Whatnow? said:
I'm suprised SWA is STILL even interested in PIT.....the O/D market is terrible, the city of Pittssburgh is begging for more and more LCC to enter their market, and their landing fees are astronomical! If anybody is going to lose out here it will be the "Pittsburghers". They are going to have NOTHING but LCC's serving their city with an inadequate flight schedule that will connect and hop all over the country! Not to mention that the WONDERFUL city of Pittsburgh will AGAIN raise taxes for the Pittsburghers to support lowering all the landing fees and tax breaks for all these LCC's to enter that market. SWA will be competing with nothing but LCC's there....what's the incentive for them......they are already huge in BWI and now PHL, making PIT large would be a HUGE mistake....look at what happened to US doing that same thing! I think SWA will come into PIT and offer a limited schedule to PHX,LAS,MCO,HOU, and maybe BWI to serve all the connections. It's a terrible shame that local crooked politics are going to destroy air travel in that city! :down:
Look, the reason the O&D market in PIT is so poor is largely US Airways' high fares. You can compare PIT to BNA and come up with some interesting conclusions. The Nashville-area metro population in 2000 was just slightly over half of Pittsburgh's. And yet, in 2002 (before the biggest cuts at PIT), BNA had just over 5.5 million domestic O&D passengers as compared to PIT with just under 5.3 million. Average trip lengths were nearly identical -- 836 miles from BNA and 871 from PIT. And yet, average fares from PIT were roughly 25% higher from PIT, at $175 compared to $139 at BNA (WN's average fare from BNA was $106). Lowering average fares in short-haul markets like PIT-PHL, PIT-BWI, PIT-BDL, or PIT-IND, for example, gets a lot of folks off the road and on the planes. And having more O&D passengers from PIT equals more tickets across which to spread the costs of the airport.
Southwest didn't request any incentives or tax breaks to serve PIT; they make decisions as to which markets to serve based on the fundamentals of the market, not on short-term distortions. They've committed to an 18-year-lease at PIT, so I think it's likely that they're in there for the long term.
US Airways' deep cutbacks at PIT came well before Southwest made any decision to serve Pittsburgh. If Southwest service at PIT ends up looking like BNA, it will likely be no more inadequate than US's current service. And in any case, US's problem at its core wasn't just the duplicative hubs -- it was the fact that the fares they were charging were so high! Once the LCC's started to invade US Airways' key spoke markets, the yields on the connecting traffic through the hubs started to drop significantly, and the amount of high-fare traffic available to support those hubs just wasn't there anymore. They've got PHX and LAS with about 190 daily departures each within an hour of each other, not to mention SAN and LAX (both near or above 100 daily) within an hour of those, DAL and HOU within an hour of each other, growing operations with 80+ flights from MCO and 60+ from TPA within 100 miles, etc.
And I don't see how "crooked politics" killed the US hub at PIT -- US rejected its leases 20 minutes before filing its final reorganization plan! The sum and substance of their "negotiations" with the county has been "cut our costs or we'll pull the hub, but we're not going to guarantee that we will maintain the hub anyway."
