[QUOTE=garykung;30984114If WN wants success in this market, the rule book has to be changed.[/QUOTE]
Southwest did not launch Hawaii flights with the intention of 28 flights per week. In the near future I'd be surprised if they did not have two, or more, flights per day from most of its west coast destinations. I also suspect that having additional overwater capacity will increase irrops options and make things easier. After all if a flight HNL-OAK has problems, passengers could be routed to SJC or SMF or via a SoCal connection. Let's do some math:
A
Southwest 737-800 or 737-Max has 175 seats.
Inter-island passengers from HNL (000)
OGG 983
LIH 648
KOA 625
ITO 506
ETOPS from HNL
LAX 1150
SFO 587
SEA 360
LAS 234
PHX 196
OGG
in-state
HNL 985
KOA 135
LIH 134
LAX 540
SFO 375
SEA 252
PDX 150
SJC 117
OAK 110
Current HNL-OGG schedule
4 flights per day each way...ergo
4*175*2=1400 daily seats
365 days/year=511,000 annual seats.
Current market is 984k seats each way, so about 2m annual so a 25% share.
Four flights HNL-KOA, too...but in an 625k enplanement that's about a 40% share.
If WN thinks they will have a big ETOPS share, they will have enough planes on the ground to have a big intra-island share, even with longer than normal times between flights.
Here's another one: the Bay Area->OGG market was about 600k passengers each way. If WN gets a 25% share that would be just one plane per day from each of the three airports. Let's assume that WN never flies SFO to Hawaii...still flights from eight already announced destinations are operated twice per day. That's 8 cities *2 flights *175passengers * 365 days=1m seats to HNL. That would make WN larger than AS at the airport by a big margin.
LAX
PHX
LAS
DEN
SAN
SMF
OAK
SJC