Jerseyguy

Mercer County (owner of TTN) Executive Brian Hughes threw out another little nugget about the new terminal that they are starting to plan for.

http://www.nj.com/mercer/index.ssf/2...oses_302m.html

"He also reiterated his interest in replacing the nearly 50-year-old passenger terminal at airport and hinted at the terminal's potential role in landing an additional passenger airline.

"I want to ensure that our airport is prepared to take advantage of future opportunities and that means another airline," he said. "If they want to come in we want to be ready for them."

So who would possibly consider TTN?
Allegiant: There's probably enough room for routes to SFB, PIE and MAYBE PDG. They also have 757s which would enable them to do TTN-LAS or TTN-LAX. THey only have 6 of them but what are they doing now that most of their Hawaii flights have been discontinued?

Spirit: They do have PHL and ACY service but they could possibly add a few cities such as MCO, TPA, FLL Perhaps maybe even ORD

EricR111

First of all, I think the new F9 ownership is setting them up to merge with either Spirit or Allegiant, so those two will not be in the running.

I think the best candidate would be Delta, as unlike United and AA/US Air, it does not have a hub nearby from which TTN would take traffic.

I think a legacy carrier with flights (2x/day) to a midwest hub (likely DTW in DL's case) would be the way to go.

I think it would be with a regional, with a jet in the 70-90 seat range (CRJ-700 or -900 or the E-170/-175/-190).

This would have one carrier (F9) focusing on leisure/VFR, while the legacy carrier could focus on business with connections.

davywavy

Quite a few people think that, but I'm not sure why, at least in the case of Spirit.

Indigo sold its remaining, and fairly substantial, holding in Spirit immediately before buying Frontier, which seems an odd thing to do if they were planning to merge the two.

Allegiant? I don't see it, but anything's possible. They're two quite different models, and according to a post on another website, based on DOT stats, Indigo's Frontier made more money ($103 million) in the first nine months of 2014 than Allegiant made in the whole year ($87 million).

Mostly, I think Bill Franke at Indigo wants to be boss and if Indigo can turn Frontier into a money printing machine, as seems to be happening, and if they wanted to merge with anyone, Sun Country Airlines might be more viable.

In any event, I doubt anything would happen until after Frontier has had a public offering, which Indigo isn't even hinting at yet.

Jerseyguy

DL to DTW or ATL (ATL is a big market for F9) may not be a bad idea though Delta would have to learn from its mistakes it made when it served TTN in 2006. They served both Atlanta and Boston using the CRJ-200 (Boston service at the end was Beech 1900s). The problem, they charged too much to fly out of TTN. They thought they could gain a premium on service when they couldn't. Flights were always $150-300 more than EWR or PHL.

rtalk25

I was thinking maybe JetBlue would have interest with BOS service and maybe FLL, or FLL and MCO. This would give JetBlue more leeway over at EWR to offer other services with it's slot pairs. For example, if a Boston based traveler that JetBlue is courting, is heading to Bristol Myers Squibb office in New Brunswick, arrival in TTN would mean about the same driving time to New Brunswick, as arrival in EWR.

Frontier has done well in TTN. It was a Denver based airline that essentially explored it out and realized it's potential. JetBlue missed out, but so did AirTran that dabbled in ABE and ACY. I suppose these carriers thought TTN was too primitive or overlooked it, but Frontier has proved it that it doesn't really matter.

EricR111

The danger of a Spirit merger is that TTN could lose out to ACY. In that case, you give Allegiant an opening to step in. And since Allegiant really focuses only on tourist destinations, you also give a second airline and opening to go to a major hub like ORD, DTW or ATL. If TTN won out over ACY, you would have the added bonus of being able to connect in FLL (or maybe MIA in a few years) to a wide range of Carribean destinations.

EricR111

BTW, I just checked out your web page about the airport, and I don't know if it was something you actually did or a quirk of my computer, but the home page came up mostly with a tweet in Greek.

davywavy

As I said, I think a Spirit merger is the least likely future, but yeh, sure, I suppose what you suggest could happen.

I think there are simpler reasons for this present debate.

TTN is thrilled with the successful breathing of life into the airport, wants to capitalise on it and - fairly sensibly - does not want to be beholden to just one airline. At the start of this, Frontier made an offer of a second loan to TNN which the airport declined because they thought it would give Frontier a lock on the airport and could perhaps keep other airlines out.

I also assume the folk at TTN have some concerns about Frontier's build-up at PHL despite Frontier's assurances that TTN is "safe." But is is interesting that this more open talk of a second airline is happening at the same time that they are publicly discussing plans for a new terminal.

I'm slightly surprised that a second airline hasn't out its hand up yet, but there is also the perception that the TTN terminal is pretty close to "full."

And for all the talk of ACY, I don't think it is as attractive as TTN would be with a better terminal, because TTN is that bit closer to the bulk of the population.

rtalk25

If DL offered just DTW from TTN, it could probably get away with charging high fares. It anyways charges high fares from PHL and EWR to DTW. I'd think DL would rely on west connections out of DTW, and connections to Asia, and some O&D to DTW.

Allegiant remains interesting. It's nearest point of presence is in ABE. I was thinking maybe it'd open at closer airport within the PHL region. Could it be PHL, TTN, ILG or ACY? It's offering now SAV as a leisure destination from certain markets that Frontier, Spirit and Southwest do not offer.

Jerseyguy

Looks ok to me

What is helping F9 is nonstop service. I live 35 minutes away from TTN. If I'm going to Denver lets say, if I fly TTN-DTW-DEN on DL and save 45 minutes getting to the airport rather than EWR or PHL, I'm going to spend that 45 minutes connecting plus I have to worry I might miss my connection due to weather, mx or something. If I now have to pay more, I'm just going to go to EWR/PHL where I can get a nonstop and a cheaper fare.

Jerseyguy

Yep, If I look at the population in the counties close to ACY, even being rather liberal, I see around 950,000. If I do that with TTN, I'm looking at closer to 1.75 million to 2 million. If TTN had proper facilities, it would definately be attractive for other airlines.

rtalk25

Sometimes DL can be lower fare with connection especially for flights within 15 days of booking.

If Delta were to go at TTN, it could charge high on TTN-DTW like it does on PHL-DTW and EWR-DTW. But, it'd likely sell low to moderate fares on select routes to the Midwest and western US with connections. It'd just be for purposes of increase marketshare in the PHL EWR area, if it was interested.

If it was just one flight on a RJ, like how it services SWF, it'd likely won't be appealing and fares will be high everywhere. But if it was treated like how it services OAK with some competitive faring, it might be fit with PHL and EWR in a good way.

DTW bound service wouldn't capture southbound traffic well. For that, an ATL connection might make sense but since Frontier is flying low fare service year round on TTN-ATL, I'm not sure if Delta can manage on connecting passengers.

It'd likely prefer keeping a stronger ATL schedule at PHL and EWR as PHL-ATL is now a competitive market: 5 competitor market, with one LCC and 2 ULCCs likely causing a downward pressure on faring. ATL is also 200 miles more distant than DTW, whereas TTN-DTW is considered a short-haul route. It can charge high and operational costs being 200 miles less might be lower.

Delta does have service at HPN to both DTW and ATL. There is no competitor on either routes. The odd thing is Delta selling E fares on HPN-ATL even when no ULCC or LCC is around.

writerguyfl

It's "Greek" to me...at least when I'm using Internet Explorer. It's okay on Firefox. IE screenshot:



Looking at your code, the problem is (probably) CSS-based. The text in question is set to "font-family: symbol". There appear to be 10 different style sheets attached. Somewhere in there, IE is getting confused.

Jerseyguy

Thank you for that. I use Firefox and didn't even look at it in IE. I guess I need to as I just looked and IE is #1 with 33% of my traffic. I don't code this myself, I use my providers web editor. I used to write HTML but that was back in the mid to late 90s when the toughest things were getting frames to work and making sure Real Player Streaming works. I changed the font and it does now work in IE. I do this because the TTN website is a piece of crap, I still think mine was better even with the Greek homepage

writerguyfl

Glad I could help...especially considering your site is a public service.