Originally Posted by
EmailKid
Well, they made have made out like bandits, but MAJOR investors weren't happy with the way VX was run. Sir Richard made a big deal of snagging DAL slots / gates, but again could not figure out how to make money there, something WN had no problem doing. And it appears that AS isn't having success with figuring out what to do with DAL either. UA did - they leased their two gates for an obscene amount of money to WN @:-)
I suspect AS can make DAL work the same way they make BUR/OAK work, an alternate in a large metro area that has access to AS's hubs and focus cities, in an airport dominated by WN, but that's just it.
VX was just weird in their choices; they dumped money into LGA/DCA slots, which might have made sense if they were going for a new midcon focus city, but they tied them up with an airport that had a hard cap on expansion (DAL), plus they wasted time and money on DAL-AUS/LAS, which just wasn't going to work going head-on against the WN beast.
I wouldn't be shocked if SFO/LAX-DFW happened at some point; you could sell SFO/LAX-DFW-XXX AA codeshares.
Originally Posted by
MDtR-Chicago
In particular, it shocks me that there's no service to DEN or PHX out of SFO! These are popular destinations for west coast business travelers!
Business travelers are going to be using UA or WN on those routes if they are SFO/DEN based given that UA has hubs in both cities and WN has good intra-CA + a DEN hub. If they are PHX-based traveling a lot to SFO and California, it's AA or WN, same story.
UA has something like 13x SFO-DEN. WN and F9 serve it pretty well too. It's not by any stretch of the imagination an underserved market.