I know US is matching Spirit's advance purchase fares. Even Southwest is caught in the mess and doing it on the one stops to DAL. But within the 2 week window pricing, it varies on the carriers, and I don't think US is charging low fares. I think this is where Spirit might be making money and capturing whoever is left. Like someone from Dallas who decides at the last minute to attend the family get together in Philly would otherwise not fly because it's too expensive could probably fly via Spirit for under $300 r/t now.

But since US is kinda breathing down Spirit's back at PHL, I've wondered is could Spirit move it's PHL flights down to ILG, and Frontier and Spirit co-exist side by side at ILG?

I agree on the impracticality of the 3x weekly. ILG-MDW was 3x weekly Monday Wed Friday in the morning. It was like a quasi business schedule flight with it leaving early on Monday, but the fares were always low when I checked for that Wednesday flight. F9 has since tweaked the schedule and I think it's only 2x weekly. Rather than split MDW between TTN and ILG, why not make it 7x weekly or 1x daily from TTN and get ILG going with some FLL. FLL is somewhat different as it targets a retired/vacation traffic flow where you can easily spend a week down in Florida, although the summer months might be challenging when it's too hot down there. ACY atleast has the Revel casino and a few hotel/attractions that maybe ppl from So. Florida come up to the Jersey shore in the summer. I'm just wondering how Spirit makes ACY-FLL work 3x daily but F9 can't even start 3x weekly at ILG.

As mentioned upthread, Allegiant is making plenty of money with less than daily frequencies. As the Cranky Flier interview pointed out, Frontier is looking to Europe for what ULCCs there do. Lots of them fly several times per week between cities rather than several times per day.

The other plus to less-than-daily service is staying under the radar of the majors. There are over 50 daily flights from PHL & EWR-Chicago, Frontier coming in offering less than daily service out of an alternate airport will keep them off the ire of the majors. No major will lower their fares to compete with flights that run 3-6x weekly out of an alternate because for every dollar it costs F9, it costs the competing airline 10-20 times that. If Frontier decided to run it daily or more, it could start to threaten the major airline's position, and could cause fare matching, or worse, someone else competing directly on the route.

I imagine Ryanair would disagree strongly with that, many of its routes are less than daily and some only 1 x weekly.

Multiple frequency is considered desirable for the business traveller, but Frontier, like Ryanair, isn't a business oriented airline - it is a leisure airline. The odd thing is that quite a lot of (small) business people fly Ryanair - they adjust their schedules to save money.

Tomorrow's flights from TTN are sold to 96% capacity but none of the routes are daily.

http://abclocal.go.com/wpvi/story?se...cal&id=9317573

"I think we are going to have customers come back to the airport in droves. They're selling tickets like hotcakes between now and Christmas," said Mercer County Executive Brian Hughes.

In fact, 96% of the seats on Friday's Frontier flights are booked.

I imagine some of that has to do with the hoopla of the reopening, but I doubt that applies at ATL, and the return flight ATL-TTN is also heavily booked.

Oddly, some of the first return flights from Florida are heavily booked, too, which raises the question - if they are returning pax, how did they get there? And if they are not returning pax, why do they want to go to TTN?

More ILG?
 

The FL flights are most likely VFR

I just realized, the two highest RASM markets in 2Q from Trenton (DTW and ATL) were the two new destinations out of ILG. Makes sense now.

I think Frontier is using TTN's success as a mould for ILG. MDW, MCO, TPA were all one of the first TTN cities. The one non TTN intro city(IAH) failed miserably. Now they are adding two of TTN's most successful cities. I'd expect RDU and FLL to come next and maybe by next fall, ILG will also get an upgrade.

Hopefully FLL will come by next winter season.

ILG has less frequency including less MDW which goes down to 2x but returns to 3x in Spring/Summer which makes sense as January/February isn't a great time to visit Chicago.

The PHL-DTW fares are high so I think it makes sense for ILG-DTW being added.

I think I was mistaken in thinking Atlanta is larger than Detroit significantly.

The CSAs are Atlanta CSA is 6 million and Detroit CSA is 5.3 million, but given that both airports are essentially gateways into the state, Georgia is 9.9 million and Michigan is close at 9.8 million. And DTW has the benefit in that it's shorter distance so less fuel/costs to fly TTN-DTW than TTN-ATL. NK for whatever reason never kept ACY-DTW year round.

It'd be interesting though if LAN was considered likely through TTN first. LAN has flights to DCA because of Sun Country, but no flight service to the New York City or Philly market. TTN could be a proxy. Also, Frontier already services LAN with Apple Vacations. It's also closer to Grand Rapids than DTW but I think the focus will be on DTW.

I wishes would they add service to MYR, CUN, LAS? Something different.

I noticed that the DEN-ILG return flights become red-eye in the summer (sometime in June-end of August) which is kind of cool, although the flights are slightly more expensive (which is understandable because of peak season).

One thing that I noticed is that Frontier isn't encouraging itineries past DEN from ILG.

I used dates of 5/28 to 6/2 (return) and checked other dates out just to check that those dates weren't anomolies. Round trip fares on Economy level exceed $800 to SFO-close to $900!, whereas the sum of ILG-DEN r/t and a DEN-SFO r/t if booked separately were just about $500 or so. A Southwest PHL-DEN-SFO was aligned around $300-500 r/t range. Similar that I found high ($800+) r/t fares on ILG-DEN-LAS and ILG-DEN-LAX and other west markets.

It's a very different strategy than Southwest that wants to encourage use of DEN, LAS and PHX (almost west coast hubs) for connections from PHL to the west coast, e.g. PHL-DEN-SFO, where Frontier wants pax O and D'ing on ILG-DEN and DEN-ILG. Maybe ILG is a test market for this type of approach in the Frontier network.

I priced LGA-DEN-SFO r/t on Frontier, and it was about $500 which seems more in line with Southwest. So, the ILG-DEN approach on O and D bookings isn't being applied to atleast LGA, where Frontier probably wants to fill the plane with some connecting pax past DEN.