Airlines constantly tweak their schedules based on demand. More people fly in the summer, so they try to ensure more flights, more staff, etc. “Super Bowl flights” are added every February. More people tend to travel during the holiday season, and that’s also accommodated.
On the other hand, some seasons are slower and flights are cut. And in this post-pandemic world, when there’s more leisure and hybrid travel than business travel, airlines have made it their business to make changes due to that, as well.
With that, Allegiant Air, Frontier Airlines and Southwest Airlines are all in the midst of either decreasing or planning to decrease their mid-week flights.
Allegiant Air
Since June of this year, Allegiant has cut their flights on Tuesdays and Wednesday to be slightly less than 2% and 8%, respectively, of their total flights. As a comparison, in the first week of June, 2019, Allegiant flew 7.2% of their flights on Tuesdays and 13.6% of them on Wednesdays.
By September, the airline will fly 2.2% of its flights on Tuesdays.
“Making these slight network reductions allows us to allocate our resources where they’re most needed, ultimately helping us enhance our reliability and better serve our customers,” said Allegiant spokesman Hector Mejia.
Frontier Airlines
Frontier said in May that it planned to decrease its service on Tuesdays and Wednesdays by roughly 20% during the second half of the year. They claim the move is because hybrid work opportunities have changed the demand of leisure patterns.
“While overall leisure travel is increasing, the benefit is disproportionately landing on peak days and in peak travel periods,” said Daniel Shurz, the carrier’s Senior VP: Commercial.
The unfortunate issue with both Frontier and Allegiant is that, as ultra low cost carriers, they don’t generally fly to/from certain cities every day. If either airline now only has one flight from Airport A to Airport B and it’s cancelled because of reasons, it could mean people might be stuck there for a few days until the next flight.
Southwest Airlines
Southwest is also revamping its midweek schedule, although their changes haven’t taken effect just yet. CEO Bob Jordan discussed the changes during the airline’s second-quarter earnings call on July 27th:
“As we shared this morning in our release, we are revamping our 2024 flight schedules,” Jordan said. “While our network is largely restored at this point, it is not optimized, especially for post-pandemic shifts in business travel.”
The changes to the schedule will take some time to implement.
“Those adjustments to the network will be largely complete by the March 2024 flight schedules, and we expect those efforts and the continued maturation of development markets to generate an incremental $500 million in pre-tax profit in 2024. The changes will also reduce the percentage of system capacity and development by more than half, returning to normal pre-pandemic levels by the end of next year,” he added.
Southwest has historically flown roughly two percentage points less of its weekly schedule on Tuesdays and Wednesdays than it does on Mondays, which is a heavier travel day. But their schedule is going to adjust to where flights on Tuesdays and Wednesdays will be closer to eight percentage points below the Monday level.
The carrier also plans to decrease some of its less popular late night and early morning flights, as well as the frequency of some of its short business-travel routes. With that they’ll be able to use the freed-up aircraft for more leisure- and hybrid-oriented medium- and longhaul routes.
As an example, the carrier plans to reduce operations on the business-oriented Midway-to-Columbus route. It will decrease from the 143 flights in ran in January 2023 to 118 in January 2024. Meanwhile, their leisure-oriented Midway to Phoenix flights will increase from 181 flights to 232 during the same respective time frames. Southwest will also fly 28 more frequencies between Columbus and Florida in January 2024 than it did in January 2023.
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