Southwest Is Coming To LaGuardia. Hello, Price War!
Starting tomorrow, Southwest will fly out of New York's LaGuardia airport, which hopefully means that flying between New York, Boston, Chicago, and Washington is about to get a whole lot cheaper.
The move is part of the airline's attempt to cater more towards business customers, who don't always want to fly into the second-tier airports Southwest usually favors.
[CEO Gary C. Kelly] has been fine-tuning the Southwest model since becoming CEO in 2004. In pursuit of business travelers, he bent the traditional "first come, first serve" seating rules with "Business Select." Passengers pay a few bucks more to get a spot at the front of the boarding line, an extra frequent-flier award and a free drink. He also pushed Southwest into the kind of huge airports it once spurned. The strategy has worked in Denver and Philadelphia, where Southwest has grown rapidly.Now it needs the big Eastern cities to buttress its service at Chicago's Midway Airport, Southwest's second-busiest hub, with more than 200 daily flights.
"If we're holding ourselves out to Chicagoans saying, 'We want to be your business airline,' we've got to be able to take them" to New York, Boston and Minneapolis, Kelly said.
New Yorkers will be able to catch five flights daily to Chicago's Midway airport, and three flights to Baltimore/Washington International. Starting in mid-August, the airline will also start flying from Boston's Logan airport.
Though LaGuardia is notoriously congested, it's still nice have another quality discount airline flying out of New York.
Southwest means business as it comes to New York [AP]
(Photo: dooleymtv)
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On the flip side of that, Southwest is turning up the heat down here in Baltimore. They are about half the action at BWI and in addition to La Guardia, they just added Milwaukee and are getting into a fare war with Airtran for Boston. Then JetBlue decided to jump on that, with $39 tickets to Logan. Really. Life is good with cheap airfare.
Southwest is throwing a party at LGA today, with the first two planes having arrived this afternoon to start flights tomorrow morning. See pics of the first landing here: [is.gd]
From what I understand, because of LGA's notorious delays, Southwest will be "isolating" these flights. Whereas many Southwest flights make multiple stops, the ones serving LGA will essentially act as shuttles to and from BWI and MDW where passengers can connect to continuing flights. This way, in the event that a flight from LGA is significantly delayed, the effects will not ripple through their whole route network.
Dear Southwest,
Please give me a free ticket. I will write to Consumerist and say "Southwest is awesome. I posted a message on Consumerist and asked for a free ticket. And they actually gave me one."
Plus, I will take goofy pictures at LaGuardia with your awesome employees. The whole thing will be the perfect combination of internet savvy and whimsy.
Twophrasebark
Dear JetBlue:
You aren't going to stand for this... are you? ARE YOU?
/get your asses in EWR pronto
Please Southwest OR JetBlue.... Someone please come to ATL.
They're only isolated on the outbound side. On the inbound side they're the usual multiple stop fest.
They're not shuttles between BWI and MDW, instead the flights just terminate at BWI and MDW to allow for long layovers for the planes to catch up on their schedule if they're delayed. Cranky Flier covered this quite well.
Holy shit! Are you saying that competition is actually good for consumers? And that when companies have to compete over the same consumers, prices will be lowered and service improves? Inconceivable!
@liz.lemonade: Even if they flew out of ATL, I think you'd have to fly to Love Field instead of DFW.
The difference is... Southwest lowers fares and KEEPS them lower. Someone did a study a few years back and found that, on average, aifares are something like 40% lower in cities served by Southwest than in cities they don't serve. The same is probably now true for Jet Blue and some of the other discounters.
And... amazing that Southwest has found a way to deal with the terrible delays without ruining their on-time schedule at other airports. Great news all around!
@WTRickman: Yeah, I know. I realized the error after posting, but I figured it wasn't worth a clarification reply-to-self.
Unfortunately here in San Francsico we have the choice of 3 low fare carriers, Southwest, jetBLUE, and Virgin America (now my preferred air carrier). Across in Oakland, we have Southwest and jetBLUE, and in San Jose we have jetBLUE and Southwest again....
All THREE airports have some form of low fare carrier, the problem is that NONE are competitive enough for anyone to select any other over another. They ALL fly to LA, Vegas, and NYC and most also up into Seattle as well, so selecting one over the other is mainly about if you want to order a REAL meal, and watch some TV, or just wanna do nothing.
Competition unfortunately only lasted so long for us, and its only a matter of time for it to happen to eastern airports as well.
I will say however, Virgin does run more specials and offers better last minute deals then the other two, but usually in off times.
San Fran! I love San Fran. :) I wish I could afford to move out to CA again.
We don't have Southwest here. They do have them in Kansas City and St Louis, but that's three hours away. All we have is American, Allegiant, Delta and United. :P Although I haven't had any problems with American (yet).
I sure hope they don't stop flying into MacArthur...
@BuddyGuyMontag: Good Heavens, yes. I'm sick of driving all the way to JFK for good prices. The cost of gas and crossing the bridges and the tolls and all that practically negates all the money you'd save anyway.
Heres hoping they come to either GSP or Charlotte soon.
No more Kennedy for me
@rwalford79: I'm not being rude. I just don't see how yours is a valid complaint at all. Having 3 low fare carriers in both SFO and OAK is bad?
Yaaaaaaaaaaaay! I once had to fly into NY and I didn't have much money, so I took Southwest, and the closest they go to the city is Islip, from where you need to take a shuttle, then the LIRR which takes more than an hour to get to Penn...So this is awesome! More going to NY for me!
@Jeff_McAwes0me: I wonder, couldf we get the same effects if we just had all the companies challenge a Sicilian to a battle of wits?
@mistifi: You can get some pretty good fares on Continental out of Newark. I always fly into Newark when I need to go to New York from IAH.
@Tyler Waldman: Unfortunately, price wars do not last long. Someone usually ends up going belly up, then the prices will go back up.
I wouldn't count on this. Southwest came to out local airport many years ago and now is the HIGHEST PRICED carrier there every time I go to buy tickets.
I have flown Southwest and was pleased, but why they come up as so pricey escapes me. I always end up flying another airline.
@cete-of-badgers: i wish they still flew from Islip to Manchester NH. See, I LIVE 10 mins from the manchester airport, and when I was living in Brooklyn for school I would have gladly traveled the extra time to get to Islip if it meant a 10 min ride home from the airport. Afer Jetblue began flying service from boston to NY, southwest ceased the MHT to Islip service. But Boston is my least favorite airport ever.
At least I'd have Continental with it's ridiculous weekend getaway fares of like 100 bucks round trip to MHT. Which is a bargain considering the normal RT fare is like 300 dollars.
I agree with this...It's almost worth the extra 1.5 hour trip to Atlanta in a car to avoid the Atlanta airport.
Except that there are no flights from BOS to LGA. BOS is only to Midaway and BWI.
As an airline, I cannot stand Southwest. They are never the cheapest, the cattle call boarding is awful and the passengers on it tend to be the lowest form of life in the air. The only good thing is that it will force other airlines to lower prices but as for Southwest itself, I have always hated having to board it. I would rather take a bus...better class of people.
Ok, I want to know who the people that are getting cheap airfare from Southwest are. Every time I look around for airfare, they're ALWAYS among the most expensive. I look way ahead of time, at the last minute, and everything in between.
@PLATTWORX: A lot of Southwest's recent cost advantages came from their long-term fuel option contracts that kept their fuel costs down while other airlines were paying for $160/barrel oil. Now that the economy has collapsed, the shoe is on the other foot and SW's fuel costs are higher than the industry average. That'll probably average out in the long run, but it probably explains your situation.
@Jeff_McAwes0me: Yes... American competition is all well and good, but the instant any non-US carriers want to fly domestic routes everyone complains (notice how much headache Virgin America went through in order to be certified to fly). So much for a "free market".
Yeah, I agree about Southwest being the more expensive airline. They've been $200 more per ticket out of DFW/DAL to the west coast (SJC, SFO, OAK) before. It's cheaper to take a non storm American flight.
@electrogeek77: Usually I fly jetBlue IAD/BOS or IAD/JFK, but since my parents now live closer to Providence than Boston, sometimes I fly Southwest BWI/PVD. The fares for all of those tend to be pretty similar, and vary mostly by the demand -- for Christmas, or four days before the flight, it'll always be more expensive.
If I book a random weekend, a month or more in advance, I can pretty much guarantee $69-$99 fares on either airline, for any of those. (My own damn fault for leaving yesterday's PVD-> BWI Southwest flight until last weekend, and paying $129 instead of the $79 I'd seen a month ago.)
I used to have Southwest as the cheapest between metro Boston and California, but I do strongly prefer jetBlue. I loathe flying, even though I do it several times a year, and find that having the TVs is worth extra $$$ to keep me sane on a flight longer than an hour.
Hey, Southwest? Pretty please start flying out of Atlanta. I would *love* a cheap ATL-DFW route.