The folks at Frontier announced their summer schedule yesterday, and there are a whopping 7 new cities joining the Frontier network. You know what they have in common? Not a single one of them is served by Southwest. Ah, very smart.

Here’s the list of newbies:

• Branson (Missouri)
• Grand Rapids (Michigan)
• Green Bay (Wisconsin)
• Long Beach (California)
• Madison (Wisconsin)
• Newport News (Virginia)
• Santa Barbara (California)

As you can see, not only are these not served by Southwest currently, but it’s highly unlikely that Southwest will start serving them any time soon. That’s a good strategy. And it won’t surprise you to know these are all being served by Embraer 190s. Those planes provide much greater comfort than the Bombardier regional jets that United flies on some of these routes and they’re much smaller than anything Southwest operates.

Long Beach is obviously the most exciting to me personally. Six slots were raffled off and Frontier picked up two. Allegiant also picked up two, and I find myself wondering what the heck they’re going to do with them (if anything) while SkyWest and JetBlue picked up one a piece. Southwest certainly won’t be coming in to Long Beach, though United could use commuter slots if they really wanted to fight Frontier.

Branson is the other really interesting one to me. When I visited those guys in 2008, Denver was one of the big markets they identified as being important to them. Sure enough, they’ve found their Denver entrant, the only flight that goes west from the new airport. It’s only operating four days a week for now, and I think it’s a good test. Even better, I know Branson has no qualms about offering exclusivity, so there’s no threat of competition coming in if it works out, at least not for awhile.

Newport News may seem kind of goofy, but I imagine there’s a fair bit of traffic on Lockheed Martin alone between the two cities. It just might work with all the military stuff going on there.

Grand Rapids, Madison, and Santa Barbara already see service from United Express, but that clearly doesn’t concern Frontier, and for good reason. They’re looking at different flight times and sometimes superior aircraft.

Grand Rapids sees a single daily Embraer 170 from United Express. Frontier will run it once a day at opposite times, so it provides a good balance. The equipment is basically the same on the inside, but the different times should help this out.

Madison and Santa Barbara are different. United flies Madison three times a day, but two of those are on cramped 50 seat CRJs and one is on an only slightly less cramped CRJ-700. That’s two long hours on those little tubes. Santa Barbara is similiar although it only sees two flights a day. So now Frontier can come in with one a day to Madison and two a day to Santa Barbara and provide a much better experience for a two hour flight.

They really are focusing on the onboard experience here, which is funny because they still haven’t addressed the fact that the onboard experience is much different on the Airbus aircraft with LiveTV than on the Embraers without. Why do I say they’re focusing on the onboard experience? The new routes are only part of the change here. They are also getting rid of their turboprops entirely – Lynx is toast. Yes, the 11 Q400s will go away and they will be replaced by either Embraer 190s or the smaller Embraer 170, something that hasn’t been seen flying out of the Denver hub yet. In the process, both Fargo (North Dakota) and Tulsa will lose Frontier flying completely.

Why are they doing that? In their words, “The transition to jet service will improve the Company’s ability to operate in highly contested markets in which the Q400 operates at a competitive disadvantage to jet service offered by competitors.” My guess is that they couldn’t find enough profitable markets in the West and figured the fleet was so small, they might as well just kill it off instead of trying to port it around the country looking for markets. Too bad. I like that plane.

They are also getting rid of their 7 orphan CRJ aircraft. They fly a boatload of Embraer regional jets, but they had this once 24-strong CRJ fleet buzzing around for Continental for awhile. It’s now down to 7, and there’s no reason to keep that either, so they can now unload one certificate (Lynx) and two aircraft types.

Lots of changes here, and I like what I see. Adding those non-Southwest competitive markets will not only strengthen the fares they get onboard the local flights, but it will also help with the mix on the flights to big cities. It will help them fight Southwest by not fighting Southwest. See, the more flights they have in these smaller markets, the more flights they can support in the larger ones even with the competition.

This is really the closest I’ve seen to a low cost carrier operating a true hub and spoke model. They have the large markets covered, and now they’re looking at the smaller ones. United should be concerned. I look forward to seeing their response.

Notes:
*Original Frontier Airbus photo via Flickr.
*I recently began a short term social media consulting stint with Long Beach Airport (full disclosure and all). It’s noted on my code of ethics page.

For an airline that has done a good job of avoiding inflight entertainment like the plague, Southwest sure is diving right in when it comes to wireless internet service. The deal is done and wifi will start rolling out aggressively next quarter.

Don’t get me wrong. They’ve been incredibly slow in actually getting to this point, but from now on, it’s going into overdrive. There are currently four test planes outfitted with wifi, but it’s been that way for about a year now. That’s one long test period.

Southwest has now signed an equipment purchase agreement and that means two things:

1) Wifi provider Row 44 is peeing its pants with joy now that it has a huge paying customer

2) The last hurdle between Southwest and the rollout is gone

Beginning in the second quarter of this year, Southwest will start outfitting a plane every other day. They hope to ramp that up to 25 per month soon after. With around 550 airplanes in the fleet, it’s going to take them about 2 years to get it completely done. When it’s done, however, they’ll be one of the largest wifi providers in the sky.

How much will they charge? They aren’t saying just yet. According to their blog, “We’re still testing a variety of price points on the four aircraft that currently have wi-fi. We’ll have a decision on price in the second quarter of 2010 . . . .”

Fair enough, but I think it’s safe to assume that the Business Select crowd won’t pay a dime while the rest of the herd will have to pay something. We just don’t know what yet. Heck, if they can get enough advertising revenue from a sponsor, maybe they’ll go that way from time to time. The good news is that they have complete and total control of the content, so they can do pretty much whatever they want on that end. That’s why they went with Row 44′s satellite option even though the ground-based option from AirCell would have fit their network just fine.

For Southwest, this is the perfect technology. They’ve long avoided inflight entertainment because it adds cost. Airlines haven’t been able to charge for overhead movies for a long time, and in-seat video is costly. It’s not just the content but also the weight and the extra pieces that can break in each seat. It’s just not a Southwest way of doing things. But wifi is different. It does add a little weight, but it only gets installed in one place so you don’t run the risk of having a problem at every seat.

More importantly, the test they’ve been running apparently shows them that they can make money on this, or at least make it cost neutral. (I have to assume that’s what the test showed.) That means that for the customers, it’s a nice perk that they’re willing to pay for. It also helps business people with productivity (even if they don’t want it, but that’s another story).

This combined with Business Select and Earlybird boarding makes it sound like Southwest is once again trying to The Company Plane for more and more people.

I had heard rumblings of this nearly six months ago, but now it’s official. United is offering one way award redemptions, and we should all be happy about that. Not only that, but they’re letting you pay with cash plus miles. These changes make your Mileage Plus miles much more useful, but of course, there are some restrictions. Let’s dig in a little bit more.

American has been doing one way awards for awhile, and my guess is that’s what spurred United to follow as well. Even though Delta may be the largest airline around these days, American and United have always seen each other as chief competitors. The shared O’Hare hub and long history certainly contributes to the rivalry. So United is matching American with one way awards and stepping up with cash plus miles.

Like American (and unlike some international carriers), United will simply charge you half the number of miles required for a roundtrip ticket to go one way. That means you can get a one way domestically for only 12,500 miles. This makes your miles much more useful.

For example, when we found an inexpensive one way fare to Indiana for the holidays, we wanted to use miles to get back home. I actually would have preferred to use my United miles, but they didn’t have one way awards. So I used American miles instead. Now I have a choice.

This also creates an opportunity to mix and match awards. Before this change, if you found saver awards available one way but only standard (double price) awards the other, you have to pay the full standard award amount. But now, you can simply buy two separate one way awards at different levels. That saves you a lot. You can also go one way on United and the other way on American, if availability dictates it.

But what if you don’t have enough miles for your trip? Well, you can use miles plus points. This to me seems like the beginning of moving toward a revenue-based mileage system. Right now, it looks like the miles and cash are zone-based, but eventually I would bet it would be able to move toward a dollar per mile valuation. Let’s see how it works now.

A roundtrip from LAX to Chicago is 25,000 miles on random dates. You can also do 15,000 miles plus $110 (actually $131 after taxes). The same award from LAX to New York is 15,000 miles plus $120. For LAX to San Francisco, it’s 10,000 miles plus $90. Nonstops versus connections don’t seem to make a difference, but these are only available on roundtrip saver awards on some routes. So it is restricted now, probably to see how it works.

Is this a good option? For LAX to San Francisco, I’d say not at all unless you’re traveling at the last minute. If you bought a ticket on those flights today, you’d save $83. That means you’re getting less than a penny per mile. For the JFK option, you’d save $266 so that’s up near 2 cents a mile. The point is, you really need to look at your specific flight to see how much it would cost to just buy it. You just can’t make a blanket statement here.

No matter what, this is a really nice option to have. I know some people are sad that this means the death of stopovers (you now need 3 one way awards), but that’s only for awards using United. If you do Star Alliance awards, then the old rules are still in tact.

This adds a lot of value for fliers and doesn’t take much away. I always like to see that.

There are plenty of milestones in any airline merger, but for me, the Delta/Northwest merger just passed some major ones. I now consider Northwest to be dead, and as a passenger, you should too.

So what exactly happened? First of all, nwa.com has now officially been decommissioned. This was the last view of the site before it was shut down early Sunday morning.

If it were as simple as just shutting down a website, Delta would have done this long ago. But when you shut down the site, there are a lot of other pieces that need to fall into place. First of all, Northwest and Delta reservations are now housed on a single system. So (thankfully) no more mixing of Northwest and Delta confirmation numbers for the same reservation.

Also, the famed NW code is toast. If you’ve seen both Northwest and Delta flight numbers for your flights in the past, you won’t anymore. It’s all Delta, all the time. Before nwa.com died, I looked up flight information to see what Northwest flights were planning to operate between LA and Minneapolis on Sunday.

Yep, none. There is no longer such a thing as a Northwest flight. But wait, there’s more.

Along with these changes comes the end of the Northwest call sign. If you listen to Channel 9 on United, you will never hear a pilot call out a Northwest flight number again. They’ll all be using Delta from now. Also, if you use FlightAware or other flight tracking sites, you’ll need to look for Delta flights.

If you had a Northwest confirmation number for an upcoming flight, you’ll want to go make sure you have the Delta one now. And even if you were booked on Delta, it’s worth going back in to double check your flight number. There have been a lot of changes lately as the airline struggled to squeeze all those flights into the finite range of numbers.

So that’s that. Goodbye, Northwest. Your time is up.

This is sort of a hybrid trip report in that I didn’t actually go anywhere domestically in New Zealand, but I had to see Air New Zealand’s domestic check-in process for myself. So I’m combining that with my flight home. Overall, it was another very good experience, though I think the service level was slightly better on the way out than it was on the way home. (And yes, I ended up in business, not premium economy.) I promise, this will be my last ANZ post for awhile.

My flight home was at 715p, but I was able to arrange a visit to the domestic terminal at Auckland first. When I interviewed CEO Rob Fyfe back in May, he explained that their new check-in process for domestic flights would allow people to arrive only 15 minutes before their flight. I had to see for myself.

The airline arranged for John Whittaker, the man in charge of the domestic operation, to take me out there. He set up a booking for me so I could go through the process myself. It lived up to its billing, for the most part, though security slowed me down to make 15 minutes a little too tight. Here’s a 2 minute video of me walking through the check-in process.

This process really eliminates lines almost entirely. Sure, if people have complicated changes or problems that need addressing, they have to see an agent, but the vast majority of people don’t need that. They just need to drop a bag off and get checked in. If you don’t have a bag, you really don’t even need to go to the kiosk. You can print out a confirmation page at home or you can pull up a barcode on your phone and just walk through security. At the gate, you can scan your pass and it will spit out a receipt for you. Then you’re on your way. You only need to check in at the kiosk if you have a bag to drop.

Now, the only problem with an arrival 15 minutes before departure here is the security line. I was there at the absolute peak of the afternoon and it took about 10 minutes to get through. Domestic security is much easier – no shoes off, and heck, they don’t even check your ID, but it did make a 15 minute door to plane timeline pretty difficult during the afternoon rush. Still, you could easily have made it in 30 minutes.

Once through, there’s a really nice lounge that has food and showers, but the gate is where it got interesting for me. Instead of having a big podium for check-in, the focus is really on the gate reader. That’s where the work gets done. There is just one employee, a turn manager, who handles the flight on the ground, but a flight attendant comes off the plane to board the flight as well.

On the ramp, only one person pushes the airplane back. He has a remote that controls the unmanned pushback tug which works on a rear wheel (at right). Then he stands at the front of the plane and walks it back. Pretty slick operation.

Once I was done getting the tour, it was time to head to the international terminal. Unfortunately, they aren’t connected in Auckland. I could walk it, but there were thunderstorms around, so John drove me over on his way out.

The check-in area is enormous, but I went to a small private room on the side set aside for premium cabin check-in. It’s a more intimate setting with a few desks of people to check you in. Up to this point, my efforts to snag a window in premium economy had failed. The flight was full, and I was only willing to take a window so I could rest my head. So, I checked in and got my boarding pass for the upper deck in business and then headed to security.

Immigration lines were about 15 minutes long, and then security took 10 seconds. On the other side, I went up to the relatively newly renovated Air New Zealand lounge. The place was massive and had all kinds of areas – kid zones, no cell phone zones, massage areas, etc. I settled in for a few minutes of email checking before our concierge Brigitte came to meet us. She said that they were able to arrange a premium economy seat downstairs if I’d like, but I cracked.

I had gotten lost hiking on Waiheke Island (at left) earlier in the day and missed my ferry. My feet were cut up from what I believe was a rogue blackberry bush, and I was a little sunburned. The thought of giving up a flat bed right then was too much. Sorry guys. I’ll just have to find a way to review the new premium economy when it rolls out later this year.

They announced in the lounge that everyone had to leave for our flight early for the extra-special TSA-mandated patdown. Joy. So we went down to find a couple of gates isolated from the rest of the concourse with a makeshift partition. First, we waited in a 10 minute line just to talk to someone. They checked our passports again and made sure it matched the name on the boarding pass. Then they checked some magic list. I wasn’t on it, so I thought that was bad news, but now I think it was the opposite. I moved up to the next person who checked my boarding pass and sent me through a corridor that dumped me out at the gate. Others had to get the full pat down and search and that took a very long time.

The partitioned gate area was too small, so everyone was standing around like sardines waiting to board. Brigitte circulated around the room answering questions while the rest of us watched boarding time come and go. Security had managed to delay our flight by about half an hour, and the staff looked to be a bit frustrated that there was nothing they could do.

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January 28, 2010
Air New Zealand #6 Lv Auckland (AKL) 715p Arr Los Angeles (LAX) 1015a (same day)
AKL: Gate 8, Runway 23L, Dept 15m Late
LAX: Gate 28, Runway 25L, Arr 32m Late
Aircraft: ZK-NBW, Boeing 747-419, Named Wellington, Maybe 90% Full
Seat: 20A
Flight Time: 11h51m

We did finally board and I took my seat upstairs with two other journalists. An older American woman boarded right behind us and the flight attendant said to her, “It looks like you’ll be sharing the cabin with these gentlemen.” The woman looked startled and said, “What?!” After repeating it, the woman breathed a sigh of relief. “I thought you said ‘Germans’.” We couldn’t help but laugh.

We took off and passed by some beautiful storm clouds before pointing northeast toward LA. I passed on dinner, flipped my bed down, popped some Ambien, and woke up 7 hours later. I was up for good at that point, so I tried to flip my bed back, but I was struggling with it a little. Nobody came to help. My glass of water also remained empty all night. The service during the middle of the flight wasn’t quite up to the level of the service on the way down, but the service at the beginning and the end when most people were awake was excellent.

I had a bacon roll once again, but this time it was more like the English-style of bacon. Delicious. (No bubble and squeak was offered, by the way.) Brigitte came up to chat with me as part of her rounds, and I found out she had only been doing this for a couple months. She used to be a journalist. So I asked what she recommended that people do in LA, and she said that she doesn’t usually get many requests for that. But when she does, it’s usually for long layovers, so she’ll point them to a beach or Santa Monica; something close by. She said that each time she travels, she tries to explore a new area so she can recommend it.

Then she went above and beyond.

Brigitte handed me her card and said that she had spoken with our concierge on the way down and he told her that I asked him for the registration of the aircraft. So she got the registration for me and wrote it down without me having to ask. Wow.

I naturally assumed that this was some sort of special treatment and she said that no, they talk like this all the time. If a couple is on a honeymoon, for example, the outbound concierge will tell the inbound concierge so she can ask specifically how the trip went and offer them a celebratory drink or something along those lines. Fantastic service.

Though we had light chop for the first two-thirds of the flight, the last third was pleasantly smooth after the sun came up. We landed just a few minutes late, and immigration was quick and painless. I didn’t have a ride, so it took me 2 hours to take public transit home. Not exactly what I was hoping for, but maybe LA will get its public transit act together one of these days. Nah, probably not.

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