Are Dallas Love (DAL) flights nearly empty?
 

I recently flew on a VX flight out of Dallas Love and there were only about 35 passengers on the flight. Whoa! Typical?

What route and what day? My last four DAL-SFO segments were either full or close to it.

Not VX, but a friend of mine flew DAL-LGA today and they were offering a $200 Travel Bank credit and a food voucher to take a later flight.

Last week, DAL-SEA.

Maybe that is why VX is ending the route and Alaska Skywest taking over?

If they were filling up A320s at sufficiently profitable yields they wouldn't be shifting the routes to E175s. Hopefully they'll be successful with those planes.

The first VX DAL-SEA flight on flew on a couple months ago was full but they have lightened up in the off season. I expect as more discover this option it gets more popular.
I have been flying the AS DAL-SEA E175 back and some flights have been full.

depends on the flight.

DAL-LGA/DCA are all up against hub-hub flying of AA and hub-major station flying of WN. DAL-LGA also has hub-major station of DL + ULCC competition.

If you look at walk up price for next week (not including the week of thanksgiving for obvious reasons), the prices on DAL-LGA/DCA are horrific. On Sundays, they are pretty high and on Fridays they are high sometimes. But on Tuesday to Thursday and Saturday, you routinely see sub $150 walk up prices. That's terrible.

As a comparison NYC-AUS/HOU are all $300 or more for non-ULCC airlines.

And they are flying high CASM E75 between stations with total of 20 flights against airlines flying 737/320 with hub operation on at least one end (which should have lower CASM). I'm not sure how AS management think these DAL-LGA/DCA could possibly work.

Keep in mind that VX never flew DAL-SEA until AFTER the merger. So it's not like AS management is knee-jerk "right sizing" the equipment. The downgrade was always scheduled, from launch.
After this spring, the only VX routes from DAL will be LAX and SFO. Everything else will move to AS ERJ's.

That said, I flew the SEA-DAL-SEA run last week. At least during the holiday period, it was decently full.
But in my limited experience, VX has often run a fairly low load factor. Hence the need to merge.............

Everytime I have flown LGA-DAL, the flights have been close to 100% full... can't speak to the yields, however.

It's not hard to fill a flight with 76 seats, but that's a very high CASM product. Hard to make money when tomorrow's walk up prices from LGA to DAL are mostly $136. Same for Thursday, Friday, Saturday. This is for a 4 hour flight. The only day where the fares are higher are Sunday and early Monday flights. The week after, I see plenty of $107 tickets. Christmas holidays are obviously pretty high. But In january, it's all around $70.

If they keep ERJs going into the late spring, they will be leaving a lot of money on the table. The load factor on the A319s I rode in at the end of summer were pretty high and once the SEA-DFW crowd catches onto this option, many may try to move over to it. The SEA-DFW flights have been packed and summer prices high.

One positive sign for DAL is that service to both SFO and LAX is now all A320.

I think the rest of destinations will be E75 for simplicity's sake. LGA is the best candidate for upgauge, but that would add complexity.

How is that a positive sign? VX always flew to DAL and DFW with A320 family planes as that is all they had.

The routes previously were flown with a mix of A319 and A320 aircraft. Now all flights use the larger A320.

Out of DAL, the issue was never LF, it was always fares.

They put E75 on LGA in there because VX running A320s were bleeding money. E75 probably got a much better load factor now but fares are still rock bottom for a 4 hour flight and the CASM is much higher than A320s. And they can't raise it much more because AA is price matching NK on this route.

They have A319 on DCA-DAL, but that was also seeing rock bottom fares of $70 for a long time.

This is what happens when you run 2 routes with toal of 20 daily flights in the 2 station combined going up against hub to hub flying of AA and hub to major out station flying of WN.