We talk about the potential of Southwest Airlines coming to Charlotte a lot because it’s the best hope of cutting the average air fare out of CLT by 8 percent to 10 percent. The odds of that happening in the foreseeable future just got a lot longer with Southwest’s bid to buy Frontier Airlines out of bankruptcy.
Really it’s not that Southwest is buying Denver-based Frontier that’s the issue. It’s what else Southwest executives said in a conference call today. They want to keep about 80 percent of Frontier’s 51 Airbus jets — we’ll call that 40 — when the deal closes (the leases on the others would be rejected) and then replace those aircraft over about two years with newly-acquired Boeing 737s that Southwest so loves on a 1-for-1 basis.
Southwest also plans to continue to serve all existing Frontier markets, both domestically and internationally.
Southwest does not currently fly internationally. Frontier has a daily flight to Cancun among other places south of the border.
Charlotte is not an existing Frontier market. Washington Reagan, Atlanta, and Anchorage are existing Frontier mainline airports (markets) that Southwest doesn’t serve currently. So yes, Southwest essentially did just announce service to all three subject to theirs being the winning bid. And that opens up a lot of connecting the dot options both domestically and internationally between those Frontier-only cities and various points in the existing Southwest system.
Southwest will in any case add service to four new destinations this year (Minneapolis, New York La Guardia, Boston, and Milwaukee). They’re adding those four cities without adding planes on net. Rather, they’re pulling aircraft off routes hit the worst by the current recession to open the new stations. The flip side of that is that it gives the airline a lot of easy internal expansion options when the economy recovers.
Put that all together and it’s extremely difficult to imagine Southwest coming to Charlotte in the next four years or so should they buy Frontier.
