Den is our #1 airport for pax. 2nd place is a couple million pax behind. Flights per day never changed….still near 300/day. They just stupidly changed how they’re staffing bases.

 

ahh. The classic case of spillage. Airlines like Frontier live off it, Spirit used to. Southwest does in some city pairs in places like ATL. IAD and ORD were all spillage. Load factors don’t tell the whole financial story. Yields do.That’s revenue management 101. In SLC’s case, Delta chose not to compete on that connection. Delta already made their money so the fares became uncompetitive. So some decide to fly on SWA. Another words those thirty passengers flew on SWA because Delta decided to let them. Not the other way around. They are not loyal to Delta BUT if Delta decided to match SWA dollar for dollar, those connections going to Hawaii would evaporate. Delta chooses not to play but they could. Airlines that have the market share have the pricing power. In this case Delta dictates how many will board on SWA to Hawaii. You can take out SLC and plug any city that SWA dominates and it’s the same thing to its competitors. I’d rather see SWA beef up where they have a competitive advantage. Delta has a 56% market share vs SWA’s 10%. That’s not including regionals. PDX is the same thing. If UAL does it, good for them. Almost all of SWA red eyes are set up for connections. I don’t see many connection opportunities in PDX. Having a third competitor in the mix to a low yielding destination like Hawaii would almost certainly be a failure economically. Those airplanes can be used for places where SWA can dictate the fares.

 

I am not looking forward to another hot summer in those old 700s. Bring on the Max 7 please!

 

Delta operates daily:

SLC-HNL on a 767
SLC-OGG on a 767

so what do you mean when you say Delta chose not to compete?

and red eyes connections are on the destination end…not departure.

You may be right…but unless you are on SWAs revenue management team, you may also be wrong.

 

rumor on the street is DEN will never grow back to what it was for pilots. No new vacancies literally forever. Dead.
They'll just route other crews through
Why not move the old 700 to HI and do intra island with non leap engines?
​​​maybe if mx actually cleans the filters on the PACKS they would work. Have you seen all the mold etc in the vents on the 700s. Gross.
then let's grab some triples or the like and make ut all economy and load it up to HI etc.

 

Had 4 CA’s retire since the last displacement…they haven’t backfilled any. Planning told me there will be vacancies back into DEN…just not this year. When it actually happens and how many….no idea. They said the -7 showing up will be the biggest driver of when that happens.

 

My money is on red eyes into DEN…plenty of pax flying through Denver, no doubt about that. Just not enough at 0500 to fill the EMOs. Who needs to be in BZN by 0700? Same problem BWI had before REs changed that. A quick look at Ops Suite shows how much loads improve as soon as the first inbounds to Den start showing up. We are our own regional feed in those markets.

 

all done by other crews besides DEN. IDK why but it seems planning is scared or wants to shrink it.
Only thing I think saves it is a brutal summer. We had no winter and they skates through it.
Im only bidding VDT this summer.

 

New hire here. Spoke with an extremely sharp high up network gentleman during our breakfast. In short when asked about DEN the answer was given that we used to dominate DEN until “United decided that was enough”

 

We never “dominated” DEN. We operate enough traffic out of there that UAL can’t squeeze us like DL did in ATL. We may not compete on the DEN-HNL leg (would prob be a through flight vs nonstop), but we do enough we’re not going anywhere. Just a matter of time before Kirby trips on his ego and they have their turn in the fire like DL is having now and like we had in ‘22.