Originally Posted by channa

What does load have to do with the success of a flight? If they're filling the plane with $200 connectors, that doesn't mean that a full flight is a profitable one.

From a West Coaster's perpsective, NW is also at a disadvantage because their hubs are not terribly popular endpoints for travel, meaning they wind up flying more connectors, which are less profitable customers.

Further, when you look at the geography of NW's hubs, they tend to be all in the north. So final connections to the south don't make sense from a travel time perspective (e.g., most people would rather fly SJC-IAH-FLL than SJC-MSP-FLL).

So, in this example, NW has the advantage of northern or eastern connections. The problem is, many large cities in the north and east already have non-stop service from the Bay Area: BOS, JFK, EWR, ORD, WAS, etc.

That means that unless NW has the lowest price (and our shopper is price sensitive), or someone is loyal to NW, the NW routes out of the West are really best suited for people going to the midwest, or smaller towns back east, where they have to connect anyway.

Of course, if you look at those towns (say ROC, BUF, PVD, etc.), you have to connect to get there anyway, so there's really no advantage to flying NW via MSP vs. say UA via ORD. It becomes a purely competitive issue of price and schedule at that point.

Further, I bet NW would probably love to downsize SJC and SMF to 70- or 100-seat jets to get only the best customers that their hubs can support, but due to the length of the flights, but they are forced to put larger aircraft on these routes, simply for the range. That, in turn, exacerbates the connectors problem, which is why NW is forced to lower prices to fill their planes.

So I really don't think we'll see NW expanding significantly out of West Coast secondary markets. If anything, we may see the reverse, like we saw with RNO and ONT. Because if they were making good money, NW would have expanded in SMF/SJC by now, and opened up shop in OAK.