We’ve talked a lot about how much money Allegiant is able to make on ancillary revenue, but for those who haven’t flown the airline, I thought I’d give you some insight into how they pull this off.

My cousin and aunt flew from Oakland to Eugene last week, and my cousin sent me a copy of his itinerary with the fare breakdown. The basic airfare was $156 for two, but by the time they were finished, it came out to $387.40. Here’s the breakdown.

The government taxes and fees are standard, of course, so they should have expected to pay $196.40 on most airlines. But here’s where things start piling up.

• Prepaid Bags – Each of them brought one bag and they paid for it in advance. That’s $15 per bag each way for a total of $60.
• Seat Selection Fee – You can just get assigned a seat at the airport, but if you want to reserve one in advance, you’ll pay $13 each way per person.
• Priority Boarding – You will have your seat assigned by the time you board, so for $5 each way, you simply get to hop on early and claim your bin space.
• Convenience Fee – You’ll pay $14 per person to book online or via the phone. The only way to avoid this fee is if you buy your ticket at the airport. I’m not sure why it came out to $27 instead of $28 here.
• Trip Flex – For $15 per person, you can have unlimited name changes until the day before departure. If you don’t purchase this option, it will cost $50 per name change at a later date. This is unique to Allegiant since nobody else will let you change names at all.

As you can see, this adds up quickly. My cousin noted:

I think that a few of the fees we didn’t necessarily have to pay (eg – priority boarding, and checking bags if we had carried on).

I wondered about that and looked at the booking process myself. They do not make it easy to opt out of some of these fees, in particular the priority boarding and seat selection fees. The checkboxes come pre-checked, and if you click the small link to uncheck them, it pops something up suggesting that you really shouldn’t do that. So you really do have to pay close attention when booking on this airline to make sure you’re not paying more than you bargained for.

And this isn’t even all the money they can extract from you. This doesn’t include the cost of food and drink on the plane. They also ran a raffle onboard that I’m sure nets them some cash as well. It also doesn’t include the money they can make from hotel and car rental bookings. Even with all these fees, I think my cousin sums it up quite well.

I think that the price may have still added up to less than a regular United flight out of SFO.

On April 14, 2008, Delta and Northwest announced their merger with the promise that they would “maintain all hubs at Atlanta, Cincinnati, Detroit, Memphis, Minneapolis/St. Paul, New York-JFK, Salt Lake City, Amsterdam and Tokyo-Narita.” I didn’t buy it, and I responded that it had to involve “cutting capacity out of the system. Where are the most likely candidates? I’m looking at you, Memphis and Cincinnati.” Now, over a year later, I thought it was time to take a look.

It appears that my predictions were half right. Cincinnati is shrinking rapidly (including a recent cut of 24 daily flights), but Memphis is actually holding strong. Who would’ve guessed? Let’s look at some graphs.

Here you can see Cincinnati’s rapid decline. I looked at the number of daily departures on a random Wednesday during November for 2007, 2008, and 2009. During that time, the number of Delta/Northwest departures from the airport have been cut in half from 416 to 208. Mainline flights have dropped from 62 to 28, and now you’ll see mostly little 50 seaters buzzing around. Can it be much longer before the cuts continue? I think not.

Then we have Memphis. Check this one out.

Memphis has held strong. There are now only 203 flights compared to 221, but that’s a much smaller decrease than what Cincinnati has seen and it’s in line with the general capacity cuts we’ve seen around the system. It has lost a lot of mainline – 78 to 42 departures – but that is still a fairly large percentage of the total operation. Most importantly, Memphis has not seen a loss in the number of destinations served, so it’s really just a frequency reduction. Meanwhile, Cincinnati has seen the number of destinations served drop from 116 to 77. See for yourself.

So we see a mixed bag here, that’s for sure. Delta appears to be finding some level of success in Memphis while Cincinnati suffers from death by a thousand cuts.

[Updated 7/7 @ 1118a: Transposed Memphis departure numbers were fixed]

Last week, Southwest’s big news was that it began service to New York’s LaGuardia Airport. For me, the interesting piece wasn’t in the air but rather on the ground. Southwest has introduced a pretty interesting looking ticket counter. Take a look.

At left, you can see the edge of JetBlue’s traditional ticket counter. Southwest, as you can see, hired the Kool-Aid man to bust through some walls and open things up. (Oh yeah!) There are four podiums with scales on each side. Customers can walk through the ticket counter and go directly on their way to the concourse.

Where do the bags go? Southwest spokesperson Whitney Eichinger tells me that customers take their own bags to the CTX scanning machine around the corner. Ah, LaGuardia must not have inline screening. This, according to Whitney, is actually one of the reasons they came up with this concept. It allows customers to walk right through to the CTX instead of having to go the long way around.

Most airlines that have tried to create a new ticket counter environment have gone for this “walk through” style. Take Alaska and their airport of the future, for instance. The goal is to keep people going through the process instead of creating dead-ends. I just hadn’t seen Southwest try this before, and it looks like a great setup. Here’s another view.

So will we be seeing this elsewhere? According to Whitney, “This is not a template for all our other new cities, but I do think we’ll try and use parts of this elsewhere when it makes sense.”

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I’m going light on my post today since it’s officially a holiday here in the US. What better way to kick off the holiday weekend than with a little airplane porn?

This time, there actually is a person involved, but fortunately, he is fully clothed. Apparently, AirTran is really happy that Mark Malkoff made it through June without a hitch. This has been great publicity for the airline and its wifi efforts, and they’ve decided to commemorate the event with a giant picture of Mark, literally on AirTran.

That’s Mark’s wife, who appears to be rather happy to have her husband back despite the fact that he hasn’t seen a shower since May.

I hope everyone enjoys their 4th here in the US. (And for my British readers, I hope you aren’t still too bitter – it has, after all, been more than 230 years. You know we still love you.)