Have just been checking the first two weeks of seat maps out of MBL, IWD and RHI to get an idea of how it's looking. Service starts the afternoon of 4/18, and I checked the first 14 full days of southbound departures 4/19 through 5/2.

Seat maps are, of course, imperfect measures...especially anything more than few hours ahead of departure. It's likely more seats are booked than show on seatmaps because some passengers (especially those booking on third-party sites like Orbitz) may well not have seat selections.

So far, about 30% of all seats inbound to MKE show occupied for those first two full weeks.

247 Manistee
219 Rhinelander
109 Ironwood

The EAS proposal had a target of 16.2 passengers per departure out of Manistee, and so far in those first two weeks there are 9.5 seats blocked per flight. From Ironwood, they are looking for 8.9 passengers per departure, and so far there are 4.2.

Considering that...

(a) Not all passengers booked have seat assignments, so actual bookings are somewhat higher thank what seat maps show (not sure how much higher,though)

(b) There are still a few weeks more for these flights to book fuller

(c) The Frontier flights are just getting started

...those first two weeks are not bad. Introductary fares definitely help, but I think it's critical to convince people to try the service and discover that it's light years better in reliabliity and comfort than what Great Lakes has offered in recent years. Once people recognize this, they have a much better chance of recapturing a lot of the lost traffic these airports could be serving. We'll see if it is enough to be successful, but so far doesn't look bad.