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Old Jul 18, 2008 | 7:58 pm
  #14  
knope2001
 
Join Date: Oct 2004
Posts: 2,653
No word...or shall I say no leak...yet.

However I think we can get a rather good clue from the website.

Schedule changes are not instant, and it often takes a couple of days for a new schedule to show up in third-party sales channels like Orbitz. But changing fare inventory shows up immediately. In a case like this, when you see all the fare buckets wiped out except full coach, that's usually a clear sign. It's an immediate way to for them to (essentially) halt the sale of tickets to a market being dropped. Even if the flights don't disappear on their website until Sunday, and perhaps the new schedule isn't on Orbitz until Tuesday or Wednesday, they have already in essence stopped selling tickets to dropped cities.

Book a week-long leisure trip for late this fall and you'll find lots of round trips in the $200-$400 range depending on city pair...except certain nonstop city pairs show a round trip of $900-$1500. A sure sign.

These eleven destinations appear to be the goners.

Mainline markets
Fort Myers
Fort Lauderdale
San Diego

CRJ markets
Hartford
Raleigh
Baltimore
San Antonio
St Louis
Louisville
Muskegon
Wausau

I've heard they were in negoatiations with Skywest not only for better rates but for fewer aircraft, and this would suggest they have gone that direction.

The biggest surprises for me at San Diego and Hartford. The Florida markets are no surprise. Raleigh and Baltimore are largely leisure traffic, and MCI-SAT seemed to be the same. St Louis and Louisville had good fares but just had a hard time filling the CRJ. Wausau didn't have the best yields for connections, and poor Muskegon just can't fill a CRJ.

What we don't know, of course, are the flight frequencies of the new schedule. But it looks very likely that these markets are going and the rest are staying.
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