Anyone done a lot of IAH and ORD flying lately? I have. It's a drag on the entire system. IAH just doesn't generate any passenger traffic. On a day with good weather, it often takes 30 minutes from taxi call to being number one for departure. So you have a half full airplane of discount fare paying pax sitting on the ground for 30 minutes and being subjected to an awful airport experience due to our "gates" there. ORD they are just trying to run like a normal SWA station with no pad in the operation. When things go awry there, as they often do, you end up with multiple airplanes holding out for long periods of time and there is just nowhere for the disruption to be absorbed, so it sticks around all day. Those two airports in particular we are stuck in a tiny corner with monster competitors that are going to defend their turf like a hungry German Shepard. They are both very inefficient to operate from and we can't generate any premium revenue there. It was a good idea that didn't work out.
ATL is going to continue to shrink. I have posted about it before, but the only reason we still have a crew base there is because of AirTran folks. It is the AA STL crew base of the SWA system. It will shrink and shrink and eventually be either insignificant or close. We can't compete against Delta there. They have the scale and political juice to keep an absolute strangle hold on ATL and that will almost certainly never change in our lifetimes.
Probably the only reason anyone would pay a premium to fly SWA is because we offer a robust network with tons of options to get to where you're going basically on time and with all your crap. Think SoCal to the Bay Area and back. The more that we weaken our core product in order to maintain these weak stations, the more we alienate those customers. I have a good friend who is an A list business traveler almost strictly in California and she is pretty annoyed at the current state of the network and the way that we have slowly allowed "other" customers to dilute the premium product that she has earned. She is the customer that we want who pays a premium to fly on us. How do you keep those customers? You fix the network and show them some appreciation. Hopefully that's what's happening, but I am not so sure.