Originally Posted by REF 5

You said the key word. "Market development." Buying a bunch of widebodies and putting in gold plated toilets with half the airplane having mini condo's is not going to get SWA anywhere. The sucking sound of money going out the door would be staggering. Their have been many airlines like Midwest, who IMO had the best domestic product ever in scheduled service, went out of business and countless other companies that had incredible hard products but couldn't generate enough revenues to cover the cost's. To be fair, none of the airlines had a customer base as big as SWA and the network to go with it. It's a good foundation to start from. The most profitable segment of US travel right now is long haul international. No airline is making money domestically in all four quarters. Yields are strong in that segment. DAL, UAL and AAL will not sit by and let SWA slowly eat away at it's most profitable segment. They will fight SWA all the way and the have the experience and infrastructure to do it. Market development is key. They already figured out how to kill SWA the LCC domestically. Don't think for one second they'll try to do it on the international front.