US Airways Dividend Miles (Pre-2005 America West merger) - Southwest Expands Again in PIT

Interesting article

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05230/555566.stm

... "Clearly this says that Pittsburgh is important to Southwest Airlines, and we are growing it, and we intend to grow it aggressively."

I'm fairly surprised they would pick PHX as a destination, especially with losing service to SAN. TPA not a surprise, but not very interesting either.

A few months ago, PHX might have not surprised me. Perhaps they are assuming that there will be several less flights per day than currently exist - in line with what US has already been doing on their own by cutting flights - and only the current HP flights (2/day?) will survive.

Regardless - not sure how many direct flights that route can support sustainably. HP only recently added and US cut capacity on planes.

Never underestimate the Southwest effect. For example when AirTran added the flights to MDW they did not perform well. However, for Southwest they are packed -- as evidenced by the addition of 2 additional flights, going to 6 daily. By adding flights to PHX and more to LAS Southwest is making many more reasonable one-stop connections available to other cities in the West, and given that a lot of USAirways options are now one-stops through CLT (usually going at least partially out of the way) or through PHL (going the wrong way) it would seem that Southwest can now better compete for travellers going beyond the cities just listed.

Just my $.02. Southwest had a recent rather large devaluation in its FF program (addition of capacity controls as of Feb 2006) so I am not as likely to book WN as I was before, but for cheap, easy, non-stop flights to Vegas, with no change fees, it still is the right choice for me.

Regardless - not sure how many direct flights that route can support sustainably. HP only recently added and US cut capacity on planes.

Make no mistake--even LUV is going to use some of that capacity to connect people to western destinations. HP probably uses a majority of the plane to connect people to western destinations.

I think it's almost preemptive on WN's part (the PHX and additional LAS flight).