Originally Posted by
LegalTender
Except Kelly says, "these routes were performing very well on AirTran," so his problem wasn't "being late to the game." It was re-staging successful runs across so many different stations. Route architecture is the foundation of an airline's product - and seat mile costs benefit from the economies of traffic density.
Many of the existing routes were relocated. For example many Airtran routes connected through Atlanta. For some reason Southwest relocated some of them to BWI or elsewhere, instead of adding more locations.
Southwest's point to point system also makes connection to these routes more difficult.
With a hub and spoke system there are certain peak arrival and departure times at the hub. Staging International Flights is easier and requires less coordination around the system. There are currently many Southwest stations that cannot access some of the international flights.
This is aggravated by Southwest flying to some of these new destinations once or a few times a week instead of several times a day as they do with most domestic destinations.