Originally Posted by
FriendlyPilot
Another problem is that if you cut a flight segment, does that now impact other flights that might be doing ok, because you lose the through passenger because you cancelled the flight that brought them on the connecting flight? You lose the network effect as you lose scale. Spirit only has 15% of passengers connecting, but still you are going to lose half or more of them so figuring out which routes to cut isn't very straightforward.
Fairly straightforward in the case of LAS. A mostly isolated focus city. Most of the traffic either originated from or was destined for LAS itself in regards to the West Coast stations that were cut. Fairly disconnected from the rest of Spirit's network, other than a few redeyes to the East Coast. Most of those 15% connectors across the Spirit network are East Coast to Latin America via MCO or FLL, which Spirit has preserved.