Frontier has been on a tear lately. In the last month, it has announced 13 new routes; 3 of them from what seems like an unlikely location, St Louis. Fresh with new ownership, it appears that the time for expansion has come, but can we expect St Louis to be the airline’s next focus city? I doubt it. Look closely and you’ll see that this is more than expansion. It’s actually a deliberate attempt to lower costs by flying airplanes harder.
A move to lower costs shouldn’t be a surprise. After all, Frontier is aiming to be an ultra low cost carrier. And to do that, you need, uh, ultra low costs. There are a lot of ways to tackle costs, but one that helps a lot when you own new, expensive airplanes is to increase utilization of those aircraft. Frontier has a lot of new Airbuses, like Spirit, and the ownership costs are fixed. (Yes, there are more maintenance costs the more you fly those airplanes, but the actual cost of owning or leasing won’t really change.)
Because of that, the more you fly the airplanes, the more you can spread out those ownership costs over more flights. There’s an old saying that an airplane on the ground doesn’t make any money. Frontier is trying to change its scheduling so that it has as few airplanes on the ground for as little time as possible. So, how exactly is this going down? Glad you asked.
Frontier has built St Louis into a fairly large operation with flights to up to 10 cities depending upon the time of year. Most recently, it announced it would fly to Portland, San Francisco, and Trenton 3 times a week each. That may sound odd, but it’s really an opportunity to run these airplanes when they’re sitting around today.
This summer, Frontier has the usual couple of daily flights to Denver, but it also has a lot of airplanes flying south under its contract with Apple Vacations. There’s a daily flight to both Cancun and Puerto Vallarta with twice weekly flights to both Montego Bay and Punta Cana, all on behalf of Apple. (Frontier can sell seats on these flights on its own as well, but they’re flown under an Apple contract.) These airplanes all follow the same general schedule. They leave St Louis early in the morning so sun-seekers can arrive in time to spend the afternoon on the beach. Then the airplanes turn back around and get to St Louis again in the afternoon.
That Cancun flight gets back to St Louis at 114p, and then what? Then it just sits around for a long time. So instead, Frontier must have looked at the route map and said “where do we have opportunity to pick up some extra bucks here?” In the old days of cheap fuel, it was so cheap to run an airplane on an extra flight that you didn’t think twice. (That explains the America West Night Flight hub in Vegas. Nothing like flying Vegas to El Paso in the middle of the night.) But today, you have to find a route that has real potential to cover not just crew costs but also fuel.
Frontier looked at the aircraft time it had and picked San Francisco and Portland. Why not LA and Seattle? Well, LA has both Southwest and American on the route while Seattle has both Southwest and Alaska. There’s a little too much competition there right now. But Portland has no nonstops at all and San Francisco just has one on United that’s timed for a midday flight from San Francisco and an evening return. Frontier could provide something different in both markets.
Now, after that airplane arrives at 114p, it will turn right around at 245p and go to either Portland or San Francisco six days a week. Then it comes right back, getting in just before midnight, ready to start the next day’s flying back to the beach. No new airplanes required. It just requires using the existing airplanes to do more.
Meanwhile, Frontier has another couple airplanes that come in between 4p and 6p depending upon the day of the week. One of those airplanes, at least on three days a week, will leave at 610p, go to Trenton, and come back at 1105p. On a couple other days, it will go to Denver, to be fed back into the rest of the Frontier system for maintenance.
The end results is great news for St Louis. They get nonstops to places at times they wouldn’t have had otherwise. If you don’t live in St Louis and you see a Frontier airplane sitting around your local airport for long stretches, maybe you’ll get a new flight as well to a destination with potential. They seem to be doing what they can to keep those airplanes in the air where they belong.
[Original St Louis Arch photo via Shutterstock]
15 comments on “Frontier’s Expansion in St Louis is All About Lowering Costs”
As a resident of STL I’m glad to see the extra destinations. And yes, the new service is increased aircraft utilization, not necessarily a harbinger of a new STL focus city.
Having said that, there is some hope for more F9 flying from here for a couple of reasons.
1. No NK. The ULCC model is now taking root in the US but NK seems focused on larger metro areas than STL. That gives F9 some opportunity for expansion. UST and ILG possibly as those markets build.
2. WN’s STL operations seemed focused on markets east of the Rockies with a few exceptions like LAS/PHX/LAX and SEA/SAN seasonally. Note that two of the three new F9 markets are in the West. Seasonal PSP and BLI might play out down the road.
3. No G4. Sure, they serve BLV and advertise pretty heavily on the radio here BLV is on the wrong side of the metro area to make much of a dent in the greater MSA leisure markets.
It may be wishful thinking on my part but I hope these new F9 markets do well enough for them to consider a few STL adds here and there. And again, with NK focused on larger markets and G4 focused on smaller ones, F9’s sweet spot could be in the mid-sized cities such as STL. I’m thinking PIT, MEM, CVG, etc…and maybe even a mini-return to MKE.
Could you do me a favor and spell out what WN, ABV, XYZ, WWLX, vodoo9, DDT, G3, LMNoP, and the rest of the acronyms or codes are? Unless there is a deliberate point to exclude the average reader from understanding the ultra-secret Enigma-like writing.
Ken – I’m happy to help decipher.
WN = Southwest
NK = Spirit
G4 = Allegiant
ULCC = ultra low cost carrier
UST = St Augustine, FL airport
ILG = Wilmington, DE airport
BLV = Mid America Airport
Perhaps a naive question, but keeping planes flying to earn revenue rather than racking up parking charges is lesson 101 in running an airline. Why were Frontier not doing this earlier ?
Because the cost of flying that plane could easily be greater than keeping it parked at the airport.
An F9 plane sits at RFD for a couple of days a week.
The Hooters flights 2-3x weekly RFD-ATL did well back in the day.
Shows they are doing something different and since it’s just to use airplanes that would just be sitting there, they can do this with any city pair where times would work out.
Shows you don’t all have to do the same thing everyone else is doing and flying between each city pair 5 or 6 times a day and cater only to business travelers.
Clearly UA doesn’t respect the new service as they have not come close to matching the fares. When WN joined the crowded STL-LGA route, DL and AA responded by matching the fares and they remain low nearly 2 years later
It’s interesting to see how once importent hubs like StL & PIT have been downgraded to the point where the only growth prospects are in the UCC relm. Stories abound with STL’s half empty concourses that were once flowing with TWA flyers including on this very site.
Surely the more flights that let you escape STL towards civilisation, the better……..
STL still has a large population and a fine airport despite the departure of TWA. It seems logical to improve service there to fill in the TWA gap–aside from the better utilization of Frontier’s aircraft. Seems like a can’t lose move.
Interesting to note that service does not have to be daily on all routes. This model has been working well for Allegiant.
I wonder if they’ll use Cincinnati in a similar way. CVG, from what I understand has been successful for them. Right now, Delta has two dailies to LAX, one to SFO and nothing to PDX or SEA. They could also try PHX and SAN.
The Bigger Dot Theory:
Cranky says that he “doubts” we’ll see STL as the next Frontier focus city.
Well, okay, maybe. I doubt ti will be “the next” because CLE already has that honour.
But a glance at the (non-interactive) Frontier route map shows the focus cities – MCO, ILG and TTN – to have bigger dots than the others (DEN has the biggest dot, of course):
http://www.flyfrontier.com/plan-book/routes-schedules/~/media/Images/F9_Images/route-map/frontier-route-map.ashx
But now CLE and STL both have bigger dots, like the other focus cities, so I guess Frontier sees it as a potential focus city, at least. MDW, which has also seen a couple of new routes, doesn’t have a bigger dot – yet.
:-)
I’m glad to see this happening. When I worked for F9, It hurt me to see one of our brand new A320’s sitting at the intl gate in CLE for DAYS midweek, as it waited for the weekend AppleVacation flying to PUJ and CUN. I knew back then that it was bad business to have you biggest, newest, and nicest aircraft literally do nothing for days and days