Carl,

Basically, the Volaris codeshare announced two years ago was a trial run at international service without the IT upgrades and operational headaches of going international. Our revenue people liked it, and to some extent it drove the decision to buy AirTran.

To suggest that SWA will not go international because we don't have the equipment and management only wants to outsource to lower cost labor is a complete fib. The idea that our reservation system alone would have been capable of booking international SWA passengers 2 years ago is laughable. It took them about a year to even be able to book a ticket on Volaris. We still can't do it on the SWA system, that's why all of the new Mexico routes that have been announced are AirTran. We will not be using AirTran's reservation system much longer, I think that you'll see some sort of outside IT contractor with a huge project over the next two years.

SWA (via AirTran) has recently announced a lot of new routes in Mexico, the home of Volaris. All codeshares combined are limited to a maximum of 4% of SWA ASM's and the company is well below that number. If they wanted to announce more Volaris codeshare they could have done it instead of announcing new SWA/AirTran routes. To be honest, I don't think that the codeshare has been all that successful because the Volaris airplanes aren't allowed to have anything on them that suggests they are Southwest Airplanes. Our website has to have the Volaris name prominently displayed on the screen at all times, and IMO that has not been appealing to the average US tourist.

The short term plan (now) is expanding near international (Mexico and Caribbean) through the existing AirTran systems. The medium term plan (5 year) is international service to Central and South America down to Brazil with 737's. Europe and Asia will require a different aircraft, and I believe that will take at least 5 years.

I think that it's great that senior guys over there are concerned about codeshare and scope because it affects the junior guys the most. In the current environment, I can't imagine SWAPA accepting more codeshares. I realize that past performance is no guarantee of future success, but I can tell you that codeshare relief for the company isn't going to happen in the next contract. Do they want it? Absolutely.