Forgive me, Blogosphere, for I have sinned.
I’ve been so wrapped up in a few other issues this past week that I completely neglected—well, actually, forgot—to prepare a blog post about our January, 2009 schedule, which went out for sale last Thursday. There are a lot of changes incorporated into that schedule, both frequency changes as well as changes to methodology (love that word—sounds so “consultant-ish”!). So, let’s dive right in!
As lots of people have already noticed—and I have to admit, you media types and all of you guys on on FlyerTalk.com and airliners.net are incredibly observant!—we have a lot of changes in the January ‘09 schedule. The number of departures change in a whopping 98 roundtrip markets (including three, which get one MORE flight each!) compared to the November ’08 schedule. Still, I wouldn’t characterize any of these as huge strategic “statements” as only three markets have been completely discontinued (Birmingham-Phoenix, Nashville-Oakland, and Nashville-Seattle), and neither are there any completely new markets. We have made these changes to better align our flying schedule with our Passenger demand.
The more interesting, schedule-geeky details are about how, and why, these reductions have been accomplished. From a scheduler’s standpoint, two things happen in every January Schedule. One, we go into winter weather, and flying times—the time it takes to get from point “A” to “B”—take the largest increase of the year. Two, we move into a traditionally slower traffic period (and January and February are two really sluggish months from an airline traffic standpoint), and that really kills flights that depart really early or really late. And you guys have told us—by your flying habits!—that you don’t like flights before 7:00 a.m., nor ones after 8:00 p.m. Our new schedule optimization “algorithm” (again, LOVE that word—sounds so educated!) allows us to move departure times around within individual markets with nearly surgical precision. We tell it we know about the earliest and latest desired flights in each market—literally, we tell the optimizer what departure times you guys want—and the resulting schedule is one that mirrors more closely than ever what you, our Customers, want.
For the January ‘09 schedule we really took advantage of this new capability and made the earliest flights later and the latest flights earlier. The result: the vast majority of the flights that are trimmed in the January schedule would have departed in the 6:00 a.m. to 7:00 a.m. or 8:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m. time frames. A hidden dynamic that’s driving this whole early/late thing is the fact that we’re not adding any new aircraft in the January schedule, so had we not slightly reduced our schedule, the longer winter flying times would have had the effect of spreading the first and last flights of the day into those time frames that we already know y’all don’t like.
Yes, I may have “sinned” in my failure to communicate, but hopefully I can come up with suitable penance to make up for it. Maybe I’ll share my grandmother’s home-made Banana Pudding recipe with you….Nanny might roll over in her grave but trust me, it’ll win me your forgiveness (even if it will blow your diet for the entire last half of 2008)!!!
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Your new schedule is messing with my LUV! I live in ABQ and met a lady from BDL on a Delta flight on Christmas day 5 years ago. Ever since we have flown back and forth, mostly on SWA, to get together. Our flights always connected through BWI, but now the only "scheduled" flight connects through MDW. My lady visited me in ABQ for MLK weekend and I had to use 2 award tickets to get her back to BDL at a reasonable hour (7:55PM). The only scheduled flight from ABQ-BDL was leaving at 4:30PM and arriving at 11:20PM. By the time she got her luggage and drove home it was going to be 1am.
Why has SWA decided that BWI is not longer a connecting city for the ABQ-BDL and BDL-ABQ routing?
Hi SWA - I'm new to your blog and also a frequent traveler. I grew up in Dallas and lived through the years as an adult where options were tough sometimes with the Wright amendment - finally that has changed!
I've recently moved to Denver and really appreciate all the routes Southwest has here. But I still wish Southwest would secure flights into Atlanta. My corporate office is there as well as parents and siblings. My options out of Denver to Atlanta are Frontier, Delta and United.
Give those airlines some competition and show them how it's really done - open routes to Atlanta PLEASE..... don't make me fly the others.
Ditto what swaeri and AnonymousSwede said regarding BNA-SEA flights...same goes for BNA-OAK(SFO area).
I just found out that my favorite segment home (flight 34 RNO-PDX) was removed! Now I'm stuck getting a flight that's 3 hours earlier, leaving me less time with loved ones :(
Please consider bringing it back - that flight has always been pretty packed (Sundays).
Bill, I'm sorry, but your statement that the decision to completely discontinue direct flights between Seattle and Nashville has been made "to better align our flying schedule with our Passenger demand" sounds like a lot of spin.
I have always chosen SWA for my BNA - SEA flights for the simple reason that you had direct flights. In my experience, every single BNA - SEA flight was 100% jammed full of passengers with no room to spare. Yes, flights with stops are available, but those increase my travel time expotentially and it's already an incredibly long flight to begin with. I don't have to look far to find another airline who will get me there more quickly.
Sorry to be so negative. You guys can wait and see how the bookings come in but, until you get those direct flights back, I won't be one of them.
One more comment about the Nashville to Seattle flight reduction:
The flight always seemed full when ever I took it and I'm not too happy with the new Nashville to Seattle schedules. My Seattle commute on SWA will change from 4-5 hours (direct) to 9 hours. That's a pretty drastic change. I refuse to spend an etire day getting out there. I noticed that Frontier now has a flight through Denver with a short connection time, total trip time 6 hrs. 15 min. It looks like they'll benefit from your schedule change.
One more thing, in you add campaign about hidden charges, you should also mention the other airlines change fees. This is a big cost for business travelers.
While I understand your data shows people don't like flights after 8:00pm, I wonder if your schedule optimization “algorigthm” is able to factor in certain market specific, possibly even day specific, data. The new schedule has only two flights between LAX-LAS after 6:00pm; not that long ago, there were four flights after 6:00pm.
I assume your data shows that only two flights optimizes use of the aircraft, crew, etc., but is the software sophisticated enough to realize (or be told) that Southern Californian's love to go to Vegas for the weekend? It may very well be that the traffic doesn't support more than two flights after 6:00pm Monday-Thursday; however, as a regular weekly LAX-LAS Friday commuter on WN for over 6 years, I can't help but feel you are leaving people (and revenue) on the ground by having only two post 6:00pm flights on Friday night. I realize modifying the schedule for one specific weekday may not be viable... but I wonder at times if our 21st century dependence on computers (not limited only to WN) takes human logic out of the equation...
One comment about flights toward the middle of the day -
If I'm taking a weekend trip, I really want to be able to leave latish on a Friday (or early on a saturday) and return as late as possible on a sunday..
Just a thought...
Evening, everyone!
Don, we're NOT afraid of ANYONE--but DTW-LAS just doesn't rise to the top of the list with new markets. Same can be said for SAN-SLC--but we are always looking for new nonstop markets to serve, and one of the first places we look is markets that we currently serve on a less-than-nonstop basis. So we'll keep watching, and will add these (and others!) in as we can.
Julian, thanks for the kind words--I LOVE to write about my job, because I am so lucky to enjoy what I do so much....but besides that, we think it's important to let readers of this blog kind of get a glimpse into our "head" so you can see why we're doing, what we're doing. I promise to keep communicating it!
Camino and Rachel, given the weakness in the economy, we're watching, carefully, to see how our bookings come in. We still have plenty of aircraft time available to add a few flights, surgically, here and there. (And Rachel--if you go onto SWALife, click on "Departments" and navigate to the reports section on the Schedule Planning tab, look at the gate sheet for BDL and other Stations up there and look how early some of the terminators are. We left ourself a little wiggle room to add some good stuff if we need to!)
Thanks, guys....keep those comments coming--and a new post (the one with Nanny's Banana Pudding recipe) will go up soon!
Bill