Originally Posted by
spooldup
There is an issue in the US as a whole compared to EU and Asia, and that is the fact that in other countries, gates are common use, there isn't any branding, and airlines have Hubs, but they don't have the fortresses that we see here in the states. This video explains it well -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_zWxdeq8F4 - Gate space in the US is EXTREMELY hard to come by, so any airline who is small or starting, its borderline impossible to grow quickly. In ATL, Delta parks planes on gates JUST enough to let the airport be convinced that gate is being used all day and it is "theirs", but in reality, it has about 5-8 open hours in a 24hr period.
This has been our issue for a while now. Gates. What's interesting is that we order aircraft around here like we can get the gates when we need them. Denver got us more gates but they're of lesser quality - you can't tell me the NEW gates on the west side of A term didn't, at some point, get auctioned off and we got outbid. We have GOT to start thinking RASM over CASM at some point.
But for the past 15 years, lowest CASM plan worked. As such a small company, you would think we could shift mentality quicker.