Here are onboard loads for the eastern markets of Frontier, plus those of some select competitors. As always, remember that onboard load is only half the picture when trying to judge relative financial performace as they do not tell us much about fare or traffic composition.
96.1% ….. DEN ….. BOS (3 total flights)
94.0% ….. DEN ….. LGA
92.7% ….. DEN ….. FLL
92.3% ….. DEN ….. DTW
91.9% ….. DEN ….. PHL
91.6% ….. DEN ….. SEA
91.5% ….. DEN ….. MCO
91.4% ….. DEN ….. LAX
91.2% ….. DEN ….. TPA
90.7% ….. DEN ….. PDX
90.7% ….. DEN ….. IND
90.6% ….. DEN ….. MSP
90.4% ….. DEN ….. SAN
90.2% ….. DEN ….. DCA
89.9% ….. DEN ….. MSY
89.5% ….. DEN ….. RFD
89.4% ….. DEN ….. OMA
89.2% ….. DEN ….. AUS
89.2% ….. DEN ….. SAT
89.1% ….. DEN ….. ATL
89.1% ….. DEN ….. LAS
88.8% ….. DEN ….. HOU
88.4% ….. DEN ….. MDW
88.2% ….. DEN ….. SFO
88.1% ….. DEN ….. RSW
87.3% ….. DEN ….. TUS
87.0% ….. DEN ….. BNA
86.9% ….. DEN ….. MKE
86.9% ….. DEN ….. DAY
86.7% ….. DEN ….. DSM
86.5% ….. DEN ….. SLC
86.4% ….. DEN ….. SMF
85.5% ….. DEN ….. DFW
84.8% ….. DEN ….. CAK
84.7% ….. DEN ….. SNA
84.6% ….. DEN ….. PHX
84.5% ….. DEN ….. GEG
82.4% ….. DEN ….. SBA
82.4% ….. DEN ….. ICT
81.5% ….. DEN ….. MCI
81.0% ….. DEN ….. STL
80.9% ….. DEN ….. BZN
80.1% ….. DEN ….. BIL
79.4% ….. DEN ….. GRR
78.6% ….. DEN ….. FSD
78.3% ….. DEN ….. ABQ
78.1% ….. DEN ….. OKC
78.0% ….. DEN ….. MSN
76.1% ….. DEN ….. PSP
75.7% ….. DEN ….. BKG
75.6% ….. DEN ….. LIT
72.2% ….. DEN ….. SDF
67.6% ….. DEN ….. TYS
66.2% ….. DEN ….. DRO
66.1% ….. DEN ….. PVU
64.3% ….. DEN ….. ASE
62.7% ….. DEN ….. HDN
56.1% ….. DEN ….. COS
IllinoisMan
Mar 23, 12, 12:44 am
33.3% .. BKG .. PHX
Um, is there anyone else here except me that finds this a bit...disturbing?! :eek: I dont think they know what theyre doing over there right now, and Im talking about the folks that are making the decisions. I'm baffled and it seems to me F9 is just trying to trying to grab headlines once again by making noise.
knope2001
Mar 23, 12, 5:09 am
Um, is there anyone else here except me that finds this a bit...disturbing?!
They apparently widely over-estimated how this market would do, but on the flip side it was a once-weekly round trip which was quickly pulled. BKG-PHX + PHX-BKG operated eight total segments in October, six total segments in November, and two total segments in December. I should have denoted the very low frequency as I did for DEN-BOS. A number of markets only operated a handful of segments in December incluging some of the new Florida flights, too.
For what it's worth, many of the markets Branson contracted with airlines to serve have been very weak. Here are December loads for Frontier and AirTran at Branson for December, sorted by number of passengers per flight. MKE and AUS did well load-factor-wise because they were served with 37-seat RJ's. Note that most markets served with mainline aircraft, except for those to the DEN and ATL hubs, flew mostly empty, including Frontier's MKE-PHX. Most were also low frequency....ATL had daily service and Denver was near-daily, but the rest of these markets had around 2-12 segments in the month.
Knope, Under your DEN load figures, I can not find IND. That route is generally very good for F9.
knope2001
Mar 23, 12, 7:33 am
Knope, Under your DEN load figures, I can not find IND. That route is generally very good for F9.
Thanks for catching that. I went back and found that both Indy (90.7%) and Nashville (87.0%) were missing. Too much haste in knocking this out last night.
MikeFromMKE
Mar 23, 12, 8:07 am
Here's Denver
89.5% .. DEN .. RFD
That's pretty impressive for the new route with subdaily service. Should be interesting to see what it does over time.
Thanks as always for the numbers Knope!
BlueHorseShoe2000
Mar 24, 12, 3:59 am
It's interesting to see how soft loads were on a lot of the AirTran routes. With Southwest starting to take over a number of MKE routes (especially the West Coast) I suspect that things will begin looking a lot worse. With no codeshare coming until next year, a lot of the traditional East-West feed critical to maintaining the hub will be gone. How long will Southwest be willing to tolerate losses in MKE before they start making changes?
Results in Kansas City were rather lackluster as well. I wonder if it is weaker traffic for Frontier overall, the use of larger Airbus jets on many of the routes historically served by 717s or E190s, or a combination of the two.
traveller001
Mar 25, 12, 5:03 pm
It's interesting to see how soft loads were on a lot of the AirTran routes. With Southwest starting to take over a number of MKE routes (especially the West Coast) I suspect that things will begin looking a lot worse. With no codeshare coming until next year, a lot of the traditional East-West feed critical to maintaining the hub will be gone. How long will Southwest be willing to tolerate losses in MKE before they start making changes?
I pondered the West coast problem with lack of codeshare. Perhaps as an interim solution it could be worked manually by reservations? i.e reservations having access to GDS and WN systems and commenting reservations to tag connecting bags appropriately?
Technically it would be interlining and not a codeshare.
MikeFromMKE
Mar 25, 12, 10:36 pm
I pondered the West coast problem with lack of codeshare. Perhaps as an interim solution it could be worked manually by reservations? i.e reservations having access to GDS and WN systems and commenting reservations to tag connecting bags appropriately?
Technically it would be interlining and not a codeshare.
That's certainly an option, but its a lot of extra bodies in reservations to handle the traffic. If they were smart they would shift all of the FL markets that aren't ATL and the P2P international over to WN as fast as possible. The ATL operation can probably sustain itself for awhile but I doubt MKE makes much sense half and half. BWI would be next but with WN's already big operation there it wouldn't do much but add more options. I have a lot of doubts that they'll even get a codeshare in place unless they finally decide to go to a third party reservation system.
knope2001
Mar 26, 12, 5:44 am
It's interesting to see how soft loads were on a lot of the AirTran routes. With Southwest starting to take over a number of MKE routes (especially the West Coast) I suspect that things will begin looking a lot worse. With no codeshare coming until next year, a lot of the traditional East-West feed critical to maintaining the hub will be gone. How long will Southwest be willing to tolerate losses in MKE before they start making changes?
Rumor has Southwest flipping Milwaukee to all-WN later this year, as the AirTran fleet gets smaller and they focus the remaining independent FL operation on Atlanta. We'll see if that comes to pass or not. Except for a small number of 122-seat 737-500's which rarely get up this direction, Southwest is nearly all 137-seat 737's which are being converted to 143-seats. That's just too much aircraft for a lot of what AirTran does out of Milwaukee much of the year, and these December AirTran numbers back that up.
As for those December numbers, most AirTran markets saw both decreased load factors and fewer total passengers compared to last year. That's striking during a period of retreat by their main competition, Frontier.
Atlanta ATL
2010 23,911 passengers
2011 20,602 passengers....change of -13.8%
Load factor dropped 5.4 points from 65.9% to 64.1%
Boston BOS
2010 10,313 passengers
2011 9,039 passengers....change of -12.3%
Load factor dropped 12.4 points from 67.6% to 55.2%
Baltimore BWI
2010 8801 passengers
2011 7237 passengers....change of -17.7%
Load factor dropped 11.0 points from 58.2% to 47.2%
Washington DCA
2010 16,827 passengers
2011 16,487passengers....change of -2.0%
Load factor dropped 8.8 points from 62.3% to 53.5%
Denver DEN
2010 4845 passengers
2011 3426 passengers....change of -29.3%
Load factor dropped 8.8 points from 60.2% to 51.4%
Fort Lauderdale FLL
2010 5360 passengers
2011 6353 passengers....change of +18.5%
Load factor increased 4.9 points from 82.7% to 87.6%
Las Vegas LAS
2010 18.504 passengers
2011 16,404 passengers....change of -11.3%
Load factor dropped 8.2 points from 72.6% to 64.4%
Los Angeles LAX
2010 14,218 passengers
2011 13,172 passengers....change of -7.4%
Load factor dropped 13.5 points from 91.0% to 77.5%
New York LGA
2010 25,582 passengers
2011 25,048 passengers....change of -2.1%
Load factor dropped 9.8% points from 76.3% to 66.5%
Orlando MCO
2010 19,856 passengers
2011 16,918 passengers....change of -14.8%
Load factor dropped 7.7 points from 81.1% to 73.4%
Minneapolis MSP
2010 15,870 passengers
2011 16,694 passengers....change of +5.2%
Load factor decreased 0.4 points from 77.5% to 77.1%
New Orleans MSY
2010 4716 passengers
2011 5207 passengers....change of +10.4%
Load factor increased 6.8 points from 65.0% to 71.8%
Phoenix PHX
2010 8936 passengers
2011 4978 passengers....change of -44.3%
Load factor dropped 5.9 points from 78.6% to 72.7%
For Myers RSW
2010 11,343 passengers
2011 11,711 passengers....change of +3.2%
Load factor increased 1.4 points from 76.0% to 77.4%
Seattle SEA
2010 7472 passengers
2011 7679 passengers....change of +2.8%
Load factor increased 2.4 points from 88.0% to 90.4%
San Francisco SFO
2010 11,657 passengers
2011 9270 passengers....change of -20.5%
Load factor dropped 11.0 points from 92.5% to 83.5%
Sarasota SRQ
2010 4213 passengers
2011 5069 passengers....change of +20.3%
Load factor increaed 12.7 points from 52.3% to 65.0%
Tampa TPA
2010 7521 passengers
2011 10,369 passengers....change of +37.9%
Load factor dropped 12.2 points from 81.9% to 69.7%
A big combination of things going on here. First, the reduction in feed hurt them a lot. They carried a lot of PIT-MKE-DEN traffic, for example, and that went away with Skywest. The loss of OMA / DFW / STL / PIT / IND took people out of seats. Another issue is some markets like LGA saw more 737's, so while traffic only slipped about 2%, load factor was down nearly 10 percentage points. In a few cases there was a notable difference in number of flights -- TPA saw several additional frequencies during the month (passengers increased but not fast enough to match capacity, so loads dropped 12.2 points), and PHX saw fewer frequencies but traffic dropped even faster (traffic off 44% but load factor only dropped 5.6%). In the case of LAS and LAX, too much red-eye capacity hurt them. In particular, MKE-LAS had a 6:00pm flight and a 9:00pm flight, and that 9:00pm flight went largely empty much of the time.
December is not an especially strong month, but it's not among the weakest because the holiday travel period usually jam-packs flights. These are not encouraging results for Milwaukee. Obviously we don't know anything about fare levels, but it's highly unlikely these are the type of high-yield routes which can turn a buck with 30-50% of the seats unoccupied.
The loss of connectivity is already hurting MKE, and that will get worse as DSM and CAK go. Having a split hub between WN and FL will make things a lot worse. Or, if MKE does flip to all-Southwest later this fall, then the liikely prospect of every flight operating with 137 (or 143) seat aircraft is concerning. Maybe the loss of DSM and CAK is why AirTran is doubling-down on MSP-MKE, a market which carries remarkably small local traffic streams but pumps in connections heavily. But will it come to a point where the only reason MKE is a hub is to serve as a connecting point for MSP? That hardly seems to justify the resources needed.
Results in Kansas City were rather lackluster as well. I wonder if it is weaker traffic for Frontier overall, the use of larger Airbus jets on many of the routes historically served by 717s or E190s, or a combination of the two.
A combination of reduced connectivity (in part caused by sporradic schedules) as well as Airbus on certain routes historically flown with 99-seat aircraft. As we now know, the only KC routes surviving into summer other than daily DEN, DCA and LGA flights are 4x/week flights to MSY and LAS.
In general terms, it seems both MKE and MCI are good at putting 50-80 local passengers onto a plane, but that's not enough. They need the marginal revenue of connecting traffic to make things work, and that's taking a beating as of late, both for Frontier in MKE and MCI and for AirTran at MKE.
MikeFromMKE
Mar 26, 12, 8:21 am
The loss of connectivity is already hurting MKE, and that will get worse as DSM and CAK go. Having a split hub between WN and FL will make things a lot worse. Or, if MKE does flip to all-Southwest later this fall, then the liikely prospect of every flight operating with 137 (or 143) seat aircraft is concerning. Maybe the loss of DSM and CAK is why AirTran is doubling-down on MSP-MKE, a market which carries remarkably small local traffic streams but pumps in connections heavily. But will it come to a point where the only reason MKE is a hub is to serve as a connecting point for MSP? That hardly seems to justify the resources needed.
WN will probably just pick up some more flights out of MSP if they have solid number on where the connecting passengers are going. No reason to stop in MKE when you can serve them nonstop.