Southwest’s May schedule is now out (PDF) and there are some interesting moves. I’ll start with St Louis. The following flights are being added.

• St Louis to Los Angeles starts with 2 daily flights
• St Louis to Nashville starts with 2 daily flights
• St Louis to New Orleans starts with 1 daily flight
• St Louis to Raleigh/Durham starts with 1 daily flight
• St Louis to San Diego starts with 1 daily flight
• St Louis to Seattle starts with 1 daily flight
• St Louis to Houston goes from 3 to 4 daily
• St Louis to Minneapolis goes from 2 to 3 daily

The LAX and Seattle flights are interesting because those are both still flown by American. I believe Southwest actually used to fly the LAX route before, but now it’s apparently the right time to come back in. While I doubt they’ll push American off the LA route just yet, I bet we see American walk away from Seattle one of these days. Speaking of LAX routes that Southwest is re-entering . . .

Long haul is making a comeback. Southwest is bringing back the Baltimore to LAX nonstop flight that it cut awhile back. The single daily flight, along with a Baltimore to Seattle run, will mark one of the first times we’ve seen Southwest go back into coast to coast flying after severely cutting back in recent years. Baltimore is also seeing an additional daily flight to Albuquerque, Buffalo, Denver, Vegas, Manchester, Norfolk, Phoenix, and Raleigh/Durham. Only the Florida markets of West Palm and Ft Myers lose a flight – going into the slower summer season that makes sense.

By the way, those LA and Seattle flights? Those are currently flown by AirTran. Looks like Southwest is making a little run at them to reassert their position in Baltimore.

Southwest also put out its Panama City schedule. They’ll run twice daily to Baltimore, Houston, Nashville, and Orlando. Looks like they’re spreading the wealth around so they can maximize connectivity. Seems like a smart way to go into that airport. I’m sure Nashville is happy to see service to a new airport from the get go. They seem to have been neglected down there for awhile.

Overall, the moves look good. We should thank Southwest for continuing to be very transparent with these changes.

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You’re probably not surprised to know that it’s St Louis that makes the most sense to me. With American’s pull down and the airport’s decision to get aggressive with incentives, it was only a matter of time before someone would come in and start cherry-picking the good routes. It looks like Southwest is the first to stake a decent claim. They’ve already announced flights to Boston and Minneapolis, and now they’re adding a third daily to the latter before it even starts. They’ll also be starting service from St Louis to six new cities in May.

There will be two a day to LA and Nashville alongside one a day to New Orleans, Raleigh/Durham, Seattle, and San Diego. What’s interesting here is that LA and Seattle are two of the nine cities to which American will continue flying from St Louis . . . for now. (Notice that Southwest is also starting service to two former American hubs – Nashville and Raleigh/Durham.) Hmm, looks like Southwest not only wants to fill in what American has ditched but also wants to push American out the rest of the markets. Smart move.

The other airport receiving new service is Denver, and that’s probably not a surprise considering how bullish Southwest has been. I honestly don’t get this one. They must see something that the rest of us don’t, because I don’t see United or Frontier going away any time soon and their results haven’t exactly been stellar there so far.

There will be a single daily nonstop to five new markets in March – Hartford, Boise, Ontario, Detroit, and Washington/Dulles. In May, LaGuardia will get a single Saturday-only flight (they don’t have enough slots to do more frequent flights). In addition, Oklahoma City, Sacramento, Tulsa, New Orleans, Portland (Oregon), Oakland, Baltimore, and Seattle will get one additional daily flight. (All of those start in May except for Oklahoma City in March.)

Of these new markets, only Hartford doesn’t have nonstop service from another carrier at this point. Boise is served by both Frontier and United, Detroit is served by Frontier, and Ontario and Dulles are served by United. They just keep growing this thing, but I’ve yet to see a good justification for why.

I don’t think this is going to require a big expansion – they’re probably just reallocating airplanes from elsewhere again. One, I like. The other, well, not so much.

This is a huge departure from the recent Southwest new city trends. Remember, we’ve seen big city airports this year – LaGuardia and Boston alongside Minneapolis and Milwaukee. This move into Panama City takes a different tack. In fact, it makes Southwest look a lot more like AirTran than Southwest.

The Panama City Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) has a whopping 164,000 people. Yikes. But if you add in the Pensacola (2.5 hours away), Tallahassee (2.5 hours away), and Ft Walton Beach (2 hours away) MSAs, you end up just over a million people. All of those towns may have their own airports, but only Pensacola has a low cost carrier. They see 4 flights a day from AirTran. So is there enough demand for this to work? Southwest seems to think so. Or maybe they just don’t care.

How can I say that? Well, take a little look at the deal they’ve put together. The St. Joe Company is a huge developer (largest landowner in Florida, apparently) that’s working on some massive projects along the panhandle. One of those is a brand-spanking new airport that’s rising from the swamp. It will open next May (and that’s when Southwest will start service). St. Joe wanted to make a big splash with the new opening, so they’ve given Southwest a sweetheart deal. Check out the 8-K. (Thanks, Airline Biz)

The so-called “Strategic Alliance Agreement for Air Service” between Southwest and St Joe puts down some guarantees. St Joe will get the following:

• Southwest guarantees that it will keep at least 2 flights a day to four cities (no cities have been announced yet)
• Southwest will share profits with St Joe
• Southwest will not start flying to any airport within 80 miles (that includes Ft Walton Beach), and if they fly to an airport within 120 miles (that appears to include Tallahassee and Pensacola), there are penalties

Those are some pretty hefty commitments. What is Southwest getting in return?

• If Southwest loses money on these routes, St Joe will make up the difference every single quarter for 3 full years (St Joe can cancel if the payment is more than $14m the first year and $12m the second)
• An agreement will be signed between Southwest, the Bay County Tourist Development Council, the Panama City Beach Convention and Visitors Bureau and the Beaches of South Walton Tourist Development Council to develop marketing efforts
• Southwest will sign an agreement with Coastal Vision 3000 to get free room nights at rental properties to use for marketing purposes

This does sound like a good old-fashioned air service guarantee scheme on steroids. That’s why I say this is very much something out of AirTran’s playbook and not Southwest’s. But will it work? It might. There is a lot of really nice, new development in this area that definitely wipes away the Redneck Riviera name. At this brand new airport, it’s possible that this guarantee will help “prove” to Southwest that it is in fact a profitable market. If that’s the case, Branson must be calling Southwest right now asking how they can play this game as well.

This one is definitely out of left field, but I guess they don’t have much to lose.

[Original image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jsclark/ / CC BY-SA 2.0]

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This particular route is an interesting one. There is a great deal of traffic, and that’s probably why TACA and American both fly it. But why is Continental going in? It’s possible that they see a marginal opportunity and it’s a way to improve utilization, but I’d like to hope that this is the beginning of Continental’s move into an expanded role between LA and Latin America.

United used to serve the San Salvador route from LA, but they pulled out within the last couple years. Continental has a strong presence in Latin America, but ever since the airline packed up its headquarters and left LA for Houston more than 20 years ago, it hasn’t had much of a presence in LA at all. So the route may or may not have been on their radar before (they’ve tried limited Mexico night flights from LAX in the past), but now with Continental joining the Star Alliance and becoming a tight partner with United, could this be recognition of a greater opportunity?

It always surprised me that United never really tried to penetrate the LA to Mexico business markets. That’s Continental’s specialty out of Houston. So now if we combine Continental’s Latin experience and capabilities with United’s strong LA presence and feed, I’d like to think that Continental may see a golden opportunity.

Do I know anything in particular about this? Absolutely not. But it makes a lot of sense. It would be great to see someone try to tap into that market.

I honestly couldn’t make this sound any worse if I tried. The CEO is John Weikle, one of the original founders of Skybus. He has slightly tweaked the plans laid out when the airline was going to be named Air Azul. Now, the flights from Rockford are gone, as are the BWI connectors. And instead of infringing upon JetBlue’s trademark, they’ll now infringe upon Alaska’s trademark. Alaska still owns the trademark for Jet America to provide charter airline services. And yes, this is a charter operation for now.

Assuming that doesn’t cause them problems, flights begin on July 13 between Newark and Lansing, Melbourne (Florida), South Bend, and the mighty Toledo. It looks like the Toledo hub starts growing on August 14 when flights to Minneapolis begin with the arrival of the second aircraft.

How the heck is this going to work? Four of the six airports involved will pour in more than $3m in the first year to kickstart the service. Can you guess which two won’t be paying? Yeah, exactly. Minneapolis and Newark hardly need to pay for this, but the others are desperate to build service.

My understanding was that Rockford was willing to waive some fees to get them in there as well, so why did they drop it? One article has Weikle saying, “Lansing and South Bend stayed on the roster because they were close to Toledo, so it would be easier to shuttle planes between them.” Oh yeah, always a good idea to fly to cities because they’re close to each other. Yikes.

The idea is to offer more Allegiant-style flying where you only fly a couple days a week to most cities. The plane spends every night in Toledo and then flies out to different places each day. The most frequent is to Newark which happens every morning but Saturday. South Bend, on the other hand, only sees two flights a week from Newark.

The schedule is really funky. There were a lot of typos in the schedule, but most I could figure out. Assuming that the flight from Melbourne to Toledo should take the same 2 and a half hours that the southbound flight takes (and not the 1 and a half hours in the schedule and on the reservation system), they’ll only be utilizing their aircraft for 9.75 hours a day.

Even that doesn’t show the true utilization during the day, because the schedule has a lot of wasted ground time. No turn is shorter than an hour and some, including Lansing in the middle of the day, are over two hours long. Could this be to accommodate the guaranteed delays they’ll face out of Newark? No, they’ve already built that in to a schedule For example, the afternoon flight from Newark to Toledo is blocked at 45 minutes longer than a late night flight on the same route.

This strategy may work for Allegiant where their fixed costs are low, but you generally don’t want to see brand-spanking new airplanes sitting on the ground for that long. It’s hard to pay for them that way. This may not matter for now under their lease agreement, but if they truly plan to be operating their own airline within two years, this is hardly the right precedent to set.

Maybe they’ll do better with their second plane. After all, CEO John Weikle admits that they’re only running the first plane like this because of all the incentives they’re getting. But the second airplane that comes in August will have a morning flight from Toledo to Minneapolis and then a late night return. It seems to me that they’re setting up Minneapolis to look a lot like Newark once the second plane comes around. The press release (which could be one of the worst press release ever assembled) says that future focus cities could include Rockford, Cincinnati, Columbus, Dayton, Greensboro, Pittsburgh, St Petersburg (Florida), and yes, Charleston (West Virginia).

Tickets are supposed to be on sale now at jetamerica.com, though at last check, the site was down due to a database error. This could be one of the most disorganized efforts I’ve seen in a long time.