Originally Posted by
iahphx
Interesting, because in 2022 they CANCELLED some of these same PHL routes! I presmumed it was because there wasn't enough "friends and family" travel to these mostly non-touristy destinations and they couldn't fill the flights.
Frontier seems to have a new strategy of flying shorter routes. Like no more Vegas flights from Philly. I assume they feel they can't charge enough to pay for the fuel on the longer flights.I'm guessing these flights are part of that strategy.
In any event, it's an almost certain bet most of these routes will soon fail, so fly them while you can. Nobody has ever had any luck competing against AA at PHL, and it seems like just about every airline has tried. Oddly, Frontier is trying again even though they have already failed.
Frontier has been growing fairly strongly at PHL over the past few years, and outside of a year or so due to COVID, it has generally been steady YoY passenger growth. Enilria's cash cows/weak link posts for F9 (essentially showing how well routes are doing relative to the airline's other routes) show that PHL generally has very few weak links (bottom 20% of RASM performance) and a good number of cash cows (top 20% of RASM), for example in Q2 2023, there was 1 PHL route in the weak links and 11 in the cash cows. Not sure why you think they failed at PHL.
They are doing shorter routes for the reason you mentioned - RASM tended to fall off much faster than CASM for them because ancillary revenue doesn't scale anywhere near what it would need to for longer domestic routes - but LAS was also likely because they have been moving away from MCO/LAS flying as a lot of airlines have thrown capacity there and it has hurt yields.