<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Originally posted by mdtony:
Exactly. If you want to fly Southwest to the Washington DC area, you have to fly to BWI, not IAD or DCA. Well, that's pretty inconvenient for most people and something that they're not willing to do.
They fly to second tier airports, and that's exactly why their business model works. Now, tell them to start flying in to the bigger ones, and watch them have some real problems.
They have a good business model that works for them and they know their limitations. Because of that, they don't go into the larger airports.
Thus, they are not the solution that everyone seems to think they are.</font>
WN doesn't avoid large airports. WN has a large number of flights at LAX.
WN doesn't fly to DCA because they don't want to deal with slots, and they don't fly to IAD because they never fly to other airline's hubs (e.g., ATL, CVG, MEM, MSP, DEN, DFW). Why I'm not sure, but that's their thinking.
There is no reason other airlines couldn't adopt WN's business plan, and modify it to include other's hub airports and assigned seating (of course, if all airlines did that, the problem of hub airports would go away). WN has a higher aircraft/employee utilization by not having few, large hubs with banks. Any airline can do that.