F9 will ever return MKE hub again?
 

Hi All,

I could not understand why Frontier is shutting it down MKE hub. Why they do that? Maybe F9 would like return MKE Hub again and they ever to reinstating more specific routes. What exactly gonna do for now?

Take a look at the last 3 years of earnings reports...

I doubt we will see any significant investment by F9 at MKE any time soon. They'll probably keep the MCO route, and possibly look at some other vacation flying, but I doubt anything additional would even be daily.

Any chance of F9 re-adding any significant service/capacity at MKE probably disappeared the other day when they began offering MKE travelers the option to transfer all their EarlyReturns miles over to DL. Having said that, I just can't see why they wouldn't be able to make a few E190 P2P routes work like MKE-LGA/DCA/DFW/MCO/TPA/LAS. I know there's competition from WN but I would think that these markets would be able to support a second carrier.

AirTran and Southwest are ferocious competitors. So people have voted with their wallets away from Frontier. The result: Frontier is putting its planes where they can actually make some money where the market is big enough (in MKE it apparently isn't) for competition on most routes they serve, where demand is high enough that they can fly either high-capacity planes or charge higher fares, or where they're the only game in town (so they can fill planes with middling fares). Pick any one, two or three of the above, and factor in Frontier's focus as a low cost carrier (ultra-low-cost to get technical, but Southwest will compete with ULCCs for the heck of it if it allows them to reinstate a monopoly later). The result: MKE isn't a good fit for them as a hub anymore. The city will have Southwest in town, United and American down the road in O'Hare, Southwest further down the road in Midway...and hub or leisure service from the likes of Frontier, Delta, etc. (actually Delta might pick up more routes if the business demand is there).

Given the choice between this and continuing to bleed (potentially compromising the Denver operation, which itself is in a very competitive atmosphere but serving a much larger market) Frontier chose to pull out of MKE, except for a handful of leisure flights and service to DEN. If an opportunity exists for another airline to serve MKE profitably (without getting hamstrung by Southwest or Delta cutting prices on a given route), maybe another airline will step in. But if people want something like the old Midwest, they don't want the new Frontier anyway...not with ever-larger planes, a la carte options for everything and flight times that might be only a handful per ccity pair per week...

Full disclosure: I've enjoyed Frontier's Denver presence for the past five years, flying them marginally more than Southwest despite parents having a Southwest credit card. I wouldn't wish Frontier leaving an area on anyone, least of all Coloradans who get great air service from their capitol thanks to two or three airlines competing on a given route with Denver as a hub. That sort of competition doesn't happen in cities as "small" as Denver very often.

I believe, in the end, there will be three or four flights a day to DEN. That's it.

No, they'll not be back; the final clue was allowing the transferrence of miles to Delta.

It was massive overcapacity in MKE and Frontier could not hang.

I guess, that is better than nothing. At least that leaves us with the whole West Coast.

Silver lining!

No more LAS, MCI, FLL, LGA, BOS, GRR, GRB and others specific routes, too.