NOTE: Be sure to click here to see all recent TravelSkills posts about: Delta’s first class fare sale + Aircraft size and flight delays + First class summer fare sales+ Chris’s summer travel outlook + United’s plans for LAX overhaul + Hertz’s fleet renewal
Oakland Airport is getting more new service from Southwest, including Atlanta. (Image: Oakland Airport)
The latest route announcements from Southwest Airlines, starting this fall, include new service between Oakland and Atlanta; new flights at Austin and Orange County, Calif.; more presence in Latin America, and more. But Ohio’s Akron-Canton Airport will lose some key routes.
November 1 is the launch date for Southwest’s Oakland-Atlanta service, its 24th non-stop destination from the California airport. The carrier started flying from Oakland to Baltimore/Washington and Dallas Love Field earlier this year, and is due to begin Oakland-Nashville and Oakland-New Orleans flights on June 7, followed by Oakland-Columbus service August 9.
At Austin, Southwest on November 1 will kick off new daily service to Seattle-Tacoma and to Boston, competing against Alaska Airlines and JetBlue respectively; and it will add a second daily roundtrip to Newark. On the same date, it will launch twice-daily Indianapolis-New York LaGuardia flights.
Last month, Southwest started flying from Kansas City to New York LaGuardia, and on November 22 it will begin new daily flights from Kansas City to southern California’s Orange County Airport. On the same date, the airline will also start daily flights from St. Louis to Orange County.
At Akron-Canton, Southwest’s schedule as of November 2 will eliminate service to Boston, LaGuardia, Washington Reagan National and Denver. The Denver-non-stop will be moved from Akron to Cleveland Hopkins Airport.
Southwest also unveiled plans to add a number of destinations in Latin America and the Caribbean from Houston’s Hobby Airport later this year. On October 15, it will start twice-daily Houston-Cancun flights and daily service from HOU to Mexico City, Puerto Vallarta and Los Cabos in Mexico; Belize City, Belize; and San Jose, Costa Rica. On November 1, Southwest will add daily service from Houston to Montego Bay, Jamaica and to Liberia, Costa Rica.
NOTE: Be sure to click here to see all recent TravelSkills posts about: Delta’s first class fare sale + Aircraft size and flight delays + First class summer fare sales+ Chris’s summer travel outlook + United’s plans for LAX overhaul + Hertz’s fleet renewal
I’ll be happier when Southwest gives us back ATL-MEM and ATL-PNS or Panama City.
Its AirTran purchase liberated Southwest from what I thought were by far the weakest elements of its strategy — 1) that any airport served had to support flights throughout the day each day of the week and 2) that the increased aircraft turnaround times at foreign airports were not worth the increased yields these destinations might provide.
Upon purchase, Southwest faced the choice of either cleansing noncompliant AirTran destinations from its combined network or going with flow at least when it thought a destination viable.
Luckily for us and it, Southwest chose the latter.
Southwest still has too few non-stops out of ATL. The ATL Business traveler often has to waste most of a day or an entire day “getting there” and then “getting home”. On a recent round trip to Syracuse I had to go SYR to TPA then home to ATL.
OAK to BNA, BWI and MSY are not new flights. Southwest operated those routes at certain times in the near past but were suspended or eliminated or put on seasonal frequencies. Those flights are merely resumption of prior service.
With service to ATL it looks like Southwest is taking a page out of Delta’s playbook: start a new route, cancel it 5 months later then a few years later resume that route but in the process publicize it as some brand new unprecented service when it reality it is not.