Southwest Stealthily Cutting Back Flights
It’s amazing what you can find by poking around Southwest’s website in the middle of the night. My friend Robert Stack, the Thanksgiving Traveler (aka King of Bumping), was playing around on the site and found that Southwest has started showing no availability for some flights beginning October 4, 2007. Now, there’s no way those flights are full already. This can only mean that Southwest is planning on pulling the flights out of the schedule entirely.
Ah, the long-speculated pullback in growth begins. So what did he find? Lots of long hauls are going away.
Twice daily flights from LAX to Baltimore and Philly are gone as are once daily flights to those airports from Oakland. Once daily flights from Orange County to Chicago/Midway and Phoenix to Cleveland are gone as well.
Other routes are just being cut back. Phoenix to Providence and Raleigh/Durham go from twice daily to once daily. Some shorter haul routes are affected as well. Houston to Austin and St Louis, Ft Lauderdale to Orlando, Islip to Baltimore and Chicago/Midway, Reno to Oakland and San Jose, and Phoenix to LAX all lose one daily flight.
You too can get in on the action. Just head on over to Southwest.com and plug in any two cities for a weekday flight after October 4. If you see it with no availability, it’s ready to be pulled. If you find any more, leave your comments below.
Another one… Albuquerque to Amarillo goes from 2 to 1 daily flight.
BWI-LAX goes away all together!
Philly to Providence loses the early morning flight (6x daily to 5x daily)
Seattle to Phoenix…down from 14 daily flights to 12. Both pulled flights make stops in Las Vegas.
I still see Seattle to Phoenix at 14. I searched one way on October 5 and October 19 and all 14 were there.
[...] to fix things so they stop leaving money on the table. So what exactly are they doing? First, as I noted last week, they trimmed their schedule up. Robert Stack did a great job of finding almost all of the routes [...]