Originally Posted by
phil94028
SFO-LAX for tomorrow morning at sensible times is $69 on several carriers. I do not think many business travelers care about assigned seats or upgrades on a one hour flight.
For the 45 min flight SJC-BUR tomorrow morning it is $286 one way! A round trip to SFO-LHR tomorrow is $630 on United for contrast.
Alaska and Avelo just do not seem to want to fool around with these routes. Even Spirit and Allegient do not want to play. As you point out they need the frequency to compete and a fare war on entry makes that hard.
LAX-SFO the majors just seem put up with it to feed connections over point to point yield.
Sure seems like someone with some ATR42 or Q400 turboprops could make lots of money on intra Calfornia outside of SFO and LAX.
But SJC-BUR was a horribly depressed market before AS left it.
And frankly I think WN was perfectly willing to hold fares in that market unprofitable for as long as it took for AS to scream uncle.
The same way AS drove WN out of SEA-GEG, GEG-PDX, GEG-BOI.
Airlines will happily play RASM chicken in existential markets.
The smaller airline that doesn’t have the ability to touch core routes for the bigger airline (basically everything west of Nevada) is going to lose here.