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Fall Schedule Open—And We’re Putting the Intl in Ft. Lauderdale International Airport!

Bill
Employee
Employee
Today’s the day! We have extended our open-for-sale date from August 6 through November 4 of this year, but we have even bigger news to share. Effective August 7, we will add Southwest’s first-ever international service from Ft. Lauderdale! Our new service between Ft. Lauderdale and Nassau is made possible by international documentation preclearance available at the Nassau International Airport. But make no mistake—it’s still an international flight, so don’t just bring your suntan lotion, bring your passport, too! Interesting service note:  you might remember that we did something very similar at Houston/Hobby before the Houston International Terminal opened. Then, it was service between Houston-Aruba, which is also a preclear destination. Besides being a good business decision from a traffic development perspective, adding limited precleared international service like these two routes before the main international terminal opens at those airports gives our local SWA Family a chance to get their feet wet (or stick their toes in the sand, as the case may be!) with their first international nonstop service. We have several new markets to tell you about, all of them with one weekday roundtrip, and all intended to be permanent!
  • Baltimore/Washington-Sacramento
  • Burbank-Portland, OR
  • Charlotte-Nashville
  • Ft. Lauderdale-Nassau
  • Los Angeles-Pittsburgh
  • Milwaukee-San Diego
  • Ontario, CA-Portland
  A couple of interesting notes about our new nonstop markets.
  • Ft. Lauderdale-Nassau, discussed above, will be our shortest international nonstop market by a long shot! At just 183 nonstop miles it’s only one mile shorter than Dallas/Love-Austin—but still longer than current shortest nonstop domestic market in our system, Houston/Hobby-Austin.
  • And Milwaukee-San Diego is a returning nonstop market, last served by Southwest last summer, in 2015.
  • Of course, you will notice that there is no mention of Long Beach. Long story short? We’re not ready yet.  There remain lot of regulations, procedures, and approvals yet to obtain. We’ll let you know as soon as everything is ready to be published!
Elsewhere around the network, weather-wise, this is always one of the quieter times of the year (with the exception of the occasional tropical system!). It’s also quieter from a traffic standpoint, with the summertime vacation travel ending as the kids go back to school. Following those trends, you’ll find adjustments to block times as well as to frequency. Overall, 106  existing roundtrip markets will see minor decreases in frequency while 20 roundtrip markets will see increases. The August schedule initially has approximately 3,700 weekday departures—and you can find a full list of nonstop markets with weekday frequencies in the attached spreadsheet. As always if you have questions—just ask.  Have a great day and a fantastic weekend!  
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