LRD

Multi-daily departures to SEA/PDX/LAX/SFO have been cancelled/pushed back another four weeks (until 06OCT).

During those four weeks you'll find zero direct LAX/PDX flights. SEA keeps multi-daily departures -- well, I guess "two" counts as "multi" -- but not the four daily departures that were previously scheduled for September.

That makes a grand total of three (count 'em, THREE !!) daily departures out of Love in September - two SEA and one (evening) SFO flight.

(Good golly! I hope I'm missing something here.)

sfozrhfco

This is fairly insignificant outstation for AS. VX won the prize and didn't have much use for it. AS inherited the failed experiment. They may maintain a token presence from the West Coast but just as likely, they could pull out and consolidate at DFW.

Colin

with a metric sh!tton of one world elites in Dallas, can’t imagine why Alaska at Love isn’t booming with a revenue premium to boot now that AS is in one world. do AA elites in Dallas just love the schlep to DFW and 0.8% chance of freebie upgrade to the west coat?

mfolf

The AA pull is too strong yeah.

Might as well wave the white flag and kill off those gates to Southwest. Long live WN at love.

eponymous_coward

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dallas_Love_Field
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dall...tional_Airport

The only top 10 destination out of both airports AS serves is LAX, which is a notoriously fragmented market. SEA/PDX/SFO/SJC/SAN is not a particularly strong portfolio for the Dallas Metroplex. LGA/DCA wasn’t a terrible idea, the problem is that combined with LAX/SFO, no real East Coast presence outside of JFK-CA regulars and limited DCA/LGA slots, plus whatever VX threw at the wall (AUS, LAS) wasn’t enough at a gate limited airport. If they really wanted a mini hub/focus city they needed 3-4 gates to add in East Coast destinations, which is gonna be “LOL, no” because WN is the big dog at DAL and made sure DAL wasn’t big enough to hold a real second banana.

IMO DAL would be better served by everyone FINALLY agreeing that DL can serve MSP/LGA/LAX/ATL, AS can serve SEA/SFO, and you’d have reasonable WN alternatives.

ItsAnAdam

I would think that now, especially w/ the oneworld and AA tie-ups, even a limited schedule to both DCA and LGA/JFK would do half decently well--Alaska could sell connections from either of those airports on American if they really wanted and I have to imagine that there's at least some population of elites who would be attracted to not having to trek out to DFW. But of course they would never do that :/

sfozrhfco

AS would have to try to get the slots back from WN which they leased to leave for 10 years at DCA/LGA and that alone is not worth the money.

With only two gates and all flights coming from/to the West there is only so much you can do. If you do business friendly schedules from even two cities, that means both gates are occupied at key times. Any other city added would have to be at odd times. They aren't going to take the risk to do anything but West Coast so they are really stuck with an asset that is really not worth much to them.

I would agree that DL would be the best option for competition against WN at LUV.

eponymous_coward

4x daily DCA/LGA (as 2/2) doesn’t really work when you’re maybe talking 10 flights a day TOTAL in market, oh, and none of your hubs make any sense for connecting (unlike literally every other airline), so all your traffic is point to point, and none of the non-slot options are actually popular destinations (and WN can crush your yields like a grape by dumping capacity). It’s not enough to get critical mass. Basically you have PAE, ONT, OAK or BUR, it’s a spoke.

DAL would not be a terrible choice for a focus city if you could get 3-4 gates, serve some other places with a reasonable schedule.

UA could probably make it work too with some grouping of DEN, LAX, ORD, LGA and IAH flights if they wanted. Arguably even better connectivity into their network than DL through LGA/ATL/MSP/LAX, better destinations too. Heck, even AA could probably make it work with ORD/CLT/LGA… but there’s DFW so why bother?

ItsAnAdam

UA used to have (and I believe still technically owns) two gates at love field, they just lease them to WN. They used to offer a flight to IAH, and easily could've expanded to offer flights to DEN, SFO, etc. if they wanted to, but clearly they decided there was more money to be made leasing it all to WN. And I doubt they'd offer flights to LAX--they ended DFW-LAX a little while ago presumably cause of low yields.

eponymous_coward

So why exactly is AS better suited to serve LGA when they’d have a grand total of two flights there? UA at least has some actual traffic there and relevance in that market, ditto DL, WN. If 2 gates at DAL doesn’t scale for UA to a viable focus city, it’s REALLY not going to scale for a smaller airline that has very little relevance in the Metroplex market because they are West Coast (which are largely NOT markets DFW/DAL flies to) and everything else is a spoke (this is also a problem with VX, too, they never really tried expanding much at JFK/NYC or anywhere outside CA, and DAL was just destined to be crippled from the start).

EmailKid

Yes, UA leased their two gates to WN.

And while almost all of their two daily flights to DEN were pretty much full according to GAs, most of the flights flew to IAH. They even had CR7 flying once in a while, but most of the flights were ERJs (145).

DAL was easy access for me, so I was REALLY annoyed when UA leased the gates

Back to AS, I hope they bring back the flights (who knows, may move back to Dallas one of these days), but even though it's much more convenient to downtown Dallas, with no lounge at DAL I can see business people schlepping to DFW, as it's not that much further (for me it was a bit of a pain, but with a rental car it's not bad).

eponymous_coward

Obviously, who doesn’t like super easy upgrades on an E75 where the airline is losing money on each flight but makes up for it in volume?

The problem is AS is nearly irrelevant in the Metroplex if they’re not serving Texas, midcon or East Coast connecting hubs to make flying DAL-XXX-YYY, CHI, top 10 markets. Adding DCA/LGA doesn’t help that much. They’re also an irrelevancy out of LGA (so there’s zero demand there), and fairly close to one out of DCA (nothing other than West Coast).

Just because VX spent a decade throwing darts on map of the US randomly trying stuff like YYZ, LGA and an undersized DAL focus city doesn’t mean AS has to do that too…

olouie

The flight loads are really picking up on the one daily SFO-DAL flights. Midweeks are selling out / oversold recently. Would be nice to see more capacity. DAL so much nicer than DFW and flying AA.

eponymous_coward

I’d hope they would stick to their knitting and run West Coast-DAL. You would think DAL is a very obvious place to rob E75s from to use for regional routes while they remove Q400s.

LRD

Multi-daily departures to SEA/PDX/LAX/SFO have been cancelled/pushed back another five weeks (until 18NOV).