The largest carrier in LAS is Southwest. They are not a ULCC. Just because a ULCC flies there doesn't make it a low margin airport.

I never said "we don't have pilot bases in low margin cities". I said that FLL is a low margin airport, which it is. I wonder how many of those "wealthy people" are flying on Spirit?

Don’t believe FLL is as low margin as you say. The demographics have changed here in South Florida a lot over the past 5 years. We have more wealth than ever before. More snowbirds that find they’re staying all year too.

As a native S Floridian I will say the demographic shift here is not great in a lot of ways. It is great for our economy though, and hopefully good for my career.

I used to live in LAS. It's a low margin airport. With a lot of ULCC flights daily.

And a lot of those wealthy people are likely flying Spirit. FLL's current low margin fares are due to Spirit's (and JetBlue) large presence there.

Are you implying that United won't want to pick up additional gates in FLL should gates become available?

The gates that would be available if given up by spirit are apparently not located near United existing gates (different terminal?). There would be challenges.

Yields out of FLL are still very low…

There’s a solid 5-6 airports we all know to check for jumpseaters. FLL is one of them. Can’t be that low.

Yes, that's correct. United's in terminal 1 and Spirit's in terminal 3 and 4.
You've never seen an airport reshuffle gates? LAX did it less than a decade ago when United gave up all of their terminal 6 gates. American ended up the winner (LAX shuffle was Kirby's baby when he was at American) in interconnecting terminals 4,5,6; United maintained terminal 7 and 8. Delta moved to terminal 3 but their Sky Club remained in terminal 5 (IIRC) for quite a while before it finally got moved over to terminal 3. I'd expect the same here.
It doesn't even have to be much of a shuffle.

There will be FLL gates becoming available due to AeroCap terminating 37 Neo leases (and another 30 some Neos on order)... Spirit is not going to be able to keep the current number of gates there.

United's network planners aren't going to sit there with their thumbs up their butts doing nothing when gate space becomes available ... at any airport.

To add to this, think about how in the last year when Frontier gave up all their A terminal gates in DEN so they could use the outdoor gates with jet stairs at the other end.

Didn't take long for us to paint blue over the green and start operating out of them.

LOLZ! The hub that smallsack wanted to shut down due to low yields...

I still mourn the loss of SEA (I had no desire to be based there, but it would have helped with expansion in the west). Fortunately, that was the only hub smallsack closed before they fired him.

Low margin refers to non-full fare leisure travels.

The premium market is full fare refundable business tickets with connections.

Snowbirds are low margin travelers.