Air Travel Naughty and Nice List: Point Counterpoint – Conde Nast Daily Traveler
One Daily Traveler blogger wrote about the Consumer Reports Naughty and Nice list. As usual, I had a different view. They’re posted together as a point-counterpoint piece.

In the Trenches: Executing the Switch – Intuit Small Business Blog
We finally switched hosts, and it’s been great.

Peter Greenberg Worldwide Radio – Peter Greenberg
I was on Peter Greenberg’s radio show talking about mergers, frequent flier programs, etc. It starts at about the 1:29 mark and goes for 10 minutes. This was taped a few weeks ago and just aired over the last weekend. As you can tell at the end, I disagree with Peter a lot on fees.

It looks like Southwest has decided to take a cue from the old school PR handbook by making a big splash over new city and route announcements while quietly slipping in cuts to other cities and routes. There are a lot of changes with the schedule for next summer and we’re really starting to see the AirTran merger impact. Some changes, like the new international flights, will be cheered while others including more small city cuts . . . not so much. Let’s dissect this.

Last Friday, AirTran (not Southwest) put out a press release announcing that it would pull out of five cities by next June. Four of those don’t have Southwest service so they will really be losing out on low fare service. I’m sure the timing of this announcement was not a coincidence – companies put out release on Friday with the hope that the news will be forgotten by Monday.

This strategy became quite clear when Sunday afternoon, Southwest announced it was adding a bunch of new routes to its network, including a lot of international. The talk was all around all the new things that are coming, but the new schedule also slipped in some bad news on some routes, with some big cuts. This wasn’t discussed at all, and while Southwest usually puts out a full PDF file with all changes, it opted not to do it this time. I’m not a fan of the new opaque strategy here.

The story you see picked up most is Southwest going international. I’ve seen headlines like “AirTran to add routes to Mexico, Puerto Rico” or “Southwest’s Airtran Adds New International Routes.” Great news indeed, but it’s too bad that people aren’t really looking at all the changes.

First let’s talk about the cities that AirTran will abandon. Three of those are small cities: Bloomington/Normal (IL), Charleston (WV), and Knoxville (TN). We’ve already seen four other cities lose out from this merger with Asheville (NC), Atlantic City (NJ), Newport News (VA), and Quad Cities/Moline (IL) going away in a previous announcement. I can’t imagine we’re done. I’d imagine that Allentown (PA), Branson (MO), Harrisburg (PA), Huntsville (AL), Lexington (KY), Pensacola (FL), Portland (ME), and Rochester (NY) are all very anxious right now. Hopefully some will stay in the network, but I would be surprised if all did. Southwest’s model just isn’t built to serve small cities the way AirTran’s was.

AirTran will also pull out of Miami and Washington/Dulles. In Miami, it’s a cost issue. That airport is absurdly expensive and has been involved in one debacle after another when it comes to building new infrastructure. AirTran had already cut back there on its own and Southwest is finally just pulling the plug, as it should. With Dulles, that’s a more curious announcement. Southwest will still fly there, but it hasn’t been able to grow the operation much at all over the years. You would think that Atlanta would be a likely connecting point in the new network, but I guess not. Neither of these are huge surprises, that’s for sure.

But all that was forgotten when on Sunday night, Southwest came out with the news about all its summer schedule changes. The big headline is the welcome news that Southwest is using AirTran to expand into Mexico and the Caribbean, as it has said it would all along. Here’s everything that coming into the network (some are seasonal changes). These are all AirTran except where noted.

• Baltimore – Branson (Saturday only), Los Angeles, New Orleans, San Francisco, and Seattle
• Chicago – Oklahoma City (on Southwest)
• Denver – Akron/Canton, Dayton, and New York/LaGuardia
• Ft Lauderdale – San Juan
• Houston – Kansas City, Raleigh/Durham, and Seattle (on Southwest)
• Las Vegas – Norfolk (on Southwest)
• Nashville – Seattle (on Southwest)
• Orange County – Cabo San Lucas and Mexico City
• San Antonio – Cancun and Mexico City
• San Diego – St Louis (on Southwest)

First things first. A hearty congrats to the mighty CAK (Akron/Canton) for not only holding on to AirTran service but seeing new, growing flights from the airport. I’ve always been a big fan of that airport, and this is yet another win. It means even more with other smaller cities losing service entirely in the merger.

Also, the Mexico stuff make a lot of sense in general. It’s about time that Southwest started tapping into that. And with Orange County just opening its customs/immigration facility this month, Southwest can finally serve Cabo from there, a market which should do very well. Not so sure about Mexico City from Orange County, however. I see Orange County as a great place for the rich and plastic to fly down to Mexican beach resorts. It’s not, however a big ethnic market and that’s more of what Mexico City needs. I’ll be interested to see how that goes, and I’ll be interested to see how Volaris, Southwest’s partner, feels about these moves.

Now Southwest would like you to think that this is it. No other big changes are happening in the network, but that’s not the case. Along with a roller coaster of frequency increases and decreases in a variety of markets (as usual), there are some routes going away. Some might be seasonal, but I bet not all.

Wondering where those slots are coming from to operate the new Denver – LaGuardia flights? Well, LaGuardia is losing AirTran’s Orlando flights. JetBlue will be happy to hear that one, and it will also be happy to see that Boston to Florida flights on AirTran are gone as well (Ft Myers and Orlando).

We’ll see the relatively recent upstart market of Milwaukee to New Orleans go away in the AirTran network. Southwest is cutting Albuquerque to Salt Lake as well as Midway to Islip. Islip continues to shrink as Southwest gets more traction at New York City airports.

So, while there is some positive news here that shows the direction of this merged airline, there is going to be some pain as well. In particular, the small cities left in the AirTran network should be really feeling nervous about the whole thing.

[Original photo via Flickr user dougtone/CC-SA 2.0]

Southwest’s acquisition of AirTran made a little news yesterday when it was announced that Southwest would bring its own airplanes to Atlanta starting on February 12. That’s just in time for the LUV-iest day of the year, Valentine’s Day. We’ve all gotten used to watching mergers unfold over the last couple of years, but this one is really being handled differently. If I’m reading this right, then I like the game plan here. Let’s see if you agree.

Beginning on February 12, Southwest will launch flights on top of the AirTran flights that already exist in four markets while adding one new one. Here’s how it’s going to look.

This all seems funny, right? I mean, Southwest will bring its own airplanes into Atlanta just as it would in almost any new city. The pattern of connecting a new spoke to its largest operations has been done time and time again. The only difference is that Southwest now owns AirTran, an enormous airline in Atlanta, yet it’s just going to sit on top of AirTran and run a parallel operation. Why would it do that?

Let’s think about how Southwest is approaching this. In Delta/Northwest and United/Continental, those airlines have both pitched this as a sort of “merger of equals” type of thing. Two great airlines come together to make one. Blah blah blah. I’m going to turn into Julia Child for a minute and look at this in cooking terms, because for some reason that’s the analogy that came to mind. Then again, I know nothing about cooking. Let’s go with the Swedish Chef.

Say that United is made with recipe U and Continental is made with recipe C. Both are recipes for airlines, but the ultimate goal is to improve them together to create a better, single airline with recipe UA. To get there, you put pieces of recipe C into recipe U and pieces of recipe U into recipe C to bring them closer to each other. But you also improve on both by adding extra ingredients until they’re both that same new recipe UA. It’s a relatively slow process, but it’s been time-tested.

With Southwest/AirTran, it’s different. Southwest is the dominant carrier, and it’s trying to get AirTran to conform to the Southwest standard, ultimately possibly taking bits and pieces from AirTran, but only around the edges.

To do this, Southwest sticks with recipe S for its product, and it tries to take AirTran’s recipe A and turn it into recipe S without much disruption at all. How does it do that? It starts with a big batch of recipe S and slowly stirs recipe A into it so that it dissolves. That’s what I think is happening here.

Southwest is bringing recipe S into Atlanta with this new service starting in February. This is the core Southwest-style operation that will form the basis of the combined airline. Slowly, we’ll see new routes brought under the Southwest name while routes slowly disappear from the AirTran brand. I imagine eventually we’ll see AirTran stop serving these (and all other) cities and the service will be consolidated under Southwest. Slowly AirTran cities will be brought into the Southwest family or they’ll disappear (as has already happened to Asheville, Atlantic City, Moline, and Newport News). Over time, Atlanta will be all Southwest, but the transition won’t happen overnight.

I bet we don’t see Southwest simply paint over the ticket counters one night in Atlanta. Instead, we’ll see Southwest get a larger and larger presence as AirTran gets smaller and smaller. Eventually, AirTran will just disappear once the entire fleet has been brought under the Southwest brand.

To be honest, I think that’s a smart way to handle this kind of merger. There’s no reason to just throw it together at once and call it the same name. Do it slow, and do it right. With that in mind, there are some things that need to be done quickly, and Southwest is addressing them.

As part of this announcement, Southwest also said that it would offer reciprocal elite status in the two frequent flier programs. So if you’re elite with AirTran, then you’ll get A-List status with Southwest and vice versa. CEO Gary Kelly also said today that codesharing between the two airlines would begin in the first half of next year. So you allow people to freely use either brand and get the same benefits while the AirTran brand still exists.

I like it. Now, whether or not Atlanta will work in the Southwest system is a whole different question. I actually have a guest post coming up on that topic soon.

Earlier this week, Southwest publicly announced its first schedule changes for its new AirTran subsidiary. The changes, though small, give us a lot of insight into how Southwest is thinking about its AirTran purchase. It’s actually kind of exciting.

When Southwest purchased AirTran, it had to make two quick moves. The first was the pull out of DFW. We already talked about that here. The second was to end AirTran’s regional partnership with SkyWest. SkyWest had been flying to smaller cities out of Milwaukee, but that couldn’t continue under Southwest’s deal with its unions. (And Southwest probably wouldn’t have wanted to continue it anyway.) So it disappears on September 6, but unlike the DFW decision, this one opened up more questions. Would Southwest try to continue serving some of those cities served by SkyWest or would it walk away? Now we know. Here’s what will happen on September 6. All of these are to/from Milwaukee:

So why do I say this is exciting? Because there’s a lot we can take away from this.

First, it’s important to know that SkyWest was flying these flights at its own risk. It shared revenue with AirTran, but AirTran didn’t have to reimburse SkyWest for costs. SkyWest had planes sitting on the ground and thought this would be a good use for those airplanes. Why is it, then, that Southwest/AirTran ends up canceling those markets with more flight frequencies? Wouldn’t you expect those to do better? Not exactly.

The difference is that Indianapolis, Omaha, and Pittsburgh are already in the Southwest system. You can fly Southwest from those cities and connect to just about any other city in the Southwest network. In other words, SkyWest was bringing people into Milwaukee and connecting into a hub operation on AirTran. Southwest no longer needs that because it already has ways to flow those people into the Southwest system.

Akron/Canton and Des Moines, however, do not have Southwest service yet. In fact, these had been two hotly-debated cities. How (if?) would Southwest continue to serve them after the merger? That fact that Southwest has decided to upgauge these flights to be on 717s is good news for them. And it shows that Southwest really does want to use those 717s to open up mid-size markets that it doesn’t serve today.

I actually wouldn’t expect these cities to necessarily keep service to Milwaukee in the long run. Today, the only other AirTran flight in Des Moines is a weekend service to Orlando. Without Milwaukee, Des Moines is an island. Akron/Canton is different with a lot of service up and down the east coast. But Milwaukee is the only real gateway to the west (unless you head south to Atlanta first).

Once the Southwest and AirTran systems merge, you might see that shift to Chicago/Midway because Southwest can flow more people into the system that way. That’s a powerful thing and it should allow the airline to serve some of these smaller cities in a way that AirTran couldn’t alone. This makes it clear to me that Southwest wants to stay in those markets. That’s what’s exciting.

St Louis seems like a different story to me. Southwest has slowly been ramping up in St Louis since American pulled down. This is just another route that Southwest probably thinks can work now so it has put some airplanes in there. It will also start flying Milwaukee to Denver once a day to complement AirTran’s single daily service. So we might be seeing the beginnings of an aircraft routing optimization project.

In the end, this is great news for Southwest loyalists who want to be able to fly to smaller cities. It’s also great news for the small to medium-sized cities that have been trying to attract Southwest for years.

[Original photos via Flickr user wbaiv, Flickr user cliff1066™, and Wikimedia Commons/CC 2.0]

Southwest, AirTran merger may mean changes for Northeast Ohio airports – WKSU
I spoke with an Ohio public radio affiliate about the impact of the Southwest/AirTran merger on the region. (This should have been included last week, but I missed it.)

Frequent flier’s tips for dealing with jet lag – CNN Out of the Office
I had some challenging travel this week from a body clock perspective, so I shared some of my tips for helping with jetlag. Nothing works really well for me, but this isn’t bad.

In the Trenches: How to Stop Working So Much – Intuit Small Business Blog
It’s hard enough working at home, but if you aren’t careful, you’ll never stop working.

Frequent Flier Facts – Woman Road Warrior
I sat down to discuss my thoughts on elite programs and whether they’re worth it. This was a piece more for those who don’t know a lot about the world of elite status.