2013 March DEN year-over-year changes
 

With the notable expansion in Orlando and the decreased number of aircraft, there have been questions about where the expansion capacity is coming from. So I did some comparisons between the planned early March 2013 schedule and the March 2012 schedule. Some of the capacity comes from pullbacks at Milwaukee and Kansas City, although both MKE and MCI were down to a handful of aircraft by then. A fair amount of frequencies is coming out of Denver as well.

The comparisons I ran were all domesitc and were for the first week in March 2013 compared to the average week in March 2012. Here are the changes in weekly frequency in Denver domestic flights.

+7 iwa phx
+6 dfw
+5 bis
+4 bmi cid mco mot sbn
+3 far phf
+1 msn okc

-1 abq bna dro lit mdw msp pvu rsw sdf
-2 aus bos bzn lga san slc
-3 bkg lax sea
-4 bil tys
-5 atl
-6 cak dsm geg pds sat sfo smf
-7 day iah mci
-8 oma
-9 sna
-10 las mke
-13 ict
-14 tus
-19 cos
-28 ase

Net change is 164/week fewer domesitc departures, decreasing from 919 to 755 per week. That's 97 fewer Airbus flights, 5 fewer E190 flights, and 62 fewer Q400 flights.

The total capacity is not off quite as sharply because I didn't go as far as factoring in capacity of each flight. There are more A320's than last year, and all the 74-seat Q400's are out, of course.

Total nonstop domestic destinations in the March schedule increase from 58 to 59, but more of them are non-daily. For further comparison, I included 2011.

Total flights per week
2011 1098 weekly flights
2012 919 weekly flights
2013 755 weekly flights

Total nonstop destinations
2011 48
2012 58
2013 59

Destinations with at least 3 flights per day
2011 27
2012 17
2013 12
Destinations with 2.00 - 2.99 flights per day
2011 14
2012 11
2013 11
Destinations with 1.00-1.99 flights per day
2011 6
2012 19
2013 16
Destinations with fewer than 1 flight per day
2011 1
2012 11
2013 20

Although the rest of the Frontier network has obviously seen great change in the past few years, the Denver system has seen big upheaval as well.

Very interesting. Thanks for doing this!!

I find it fascinating that the new CEO is doing what no other at Frontier has dared to do, although Sean Menke was headed in that direction.

When Southwest first announced DEN, Frontier's then CEO Potter made the rounds and said "we will not give an inch." United did much the same (raising capacity frequency/matching Southwest fares) and it didn't work in either case.

Southwest was unstoppable, and its surging growth at DEN may have been unrelated to its actual profit there. But within a year, DEN had changed from one of United's most profitable hubs to its least profitable - the Rocky Mountain News flat out said DEN was losing money for United:

http://m.rockymountainnews.com/news/...on-denver-hub/

"United loses money on Denver hub"

United abandoned the capacity increases, stopped matching Southwest fares and went for higher yield. Remember Ted?

Frontier never quite bit that bullet, although Sean Menke understood it. Now we have CEO Siegel, who is charged with making Frontier consistently profitable, and who has fully accepted that fewer frequencies operating profitably are better than more frequencies at break even or a loss.

Two things work against him. (i) The widely believed Conventional Wisdom that pax want frequency. But that is only true of business pax - and Frontier is (essentially) a leisure airline.

(ii) The other CW that "size matters" and that any downsizing at DEN is waving the white flag of surrender in the face of the Southwest. Yet ultimately, what does that matter if the airline is operating profitably?

And the Frontier Airbus fleet has been operating profitably at DEN for some time. It was the non-Airbus fleet and the MKE Distraction that was costing an arm and a leg. The turnaround from Q2/2011 to Q2/2012 was in the order of $50 million.

In Q2, more than 85% of Frontier's business was at DEN - and Q2 was profitable ($14 million). Q3 hasn't happened yet, but the analysts have raised their estimates by 11 cents a share since the Q2 profit and it is fair to assume that Q3 will be profitable. Now everything is geared to making Q4 profitable and, hopefully, the demon quarter, Q1/2013. It is a very long time (2003?) since Frontier was profitable in Q1.

Sean Menke once said that there has to be more to Frontier than DEN, but DEN must be profitable first.

Frontier seems to be there - or close to it - and so we watch an expansion beyond DEN, but an organic expansion (at MCO), rather than an imposed expansion (at MKE/MCI).

There is no criticism of Bryan Bedford in this. Certainly he made some mistakes but I believe that MKE was a noble experiment and one which showed the path to the future, although at huge cost.

I've been following Frontier since 1998, and for the first time in a long time, I see Frontier playing to its strengths (DEN/MCO/CUN and now perhaps PUJ) rather than trying to patch over its weaknesses.

Probably because CEO Siegel has done what should have been done a long time ago - he has given an inch.