why is flight saturday only?

[CupCrusher40]

ty

[floridaguy]

No airline is going to run an empty plane.  Their data likely showed them that over time, the only viable schedule was on Saturday where they could fill up the plane.

[DancingDavidE]

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@floridaguy wrote:

No airline is going to run an empty plane.  Their data likely showed them that over time, the only viable schedule was on Saturday where they could fill up the plane.

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Not that a daily service wouldn't be viable necessarily, but prioritized based on the current availability of planes and staff resulted in only the weekend service for that city pair.

They also factor in if the destination can be reached from a connection very easily - for instance if there's daily service from one of the regional "hubs" like Baltimore or Nashville then there might not be a direct flight from further west. Southwest has its origins with short-haul travel and they are sometimes content to offer several 1-stop pathways to a location that funnel through some other location.

Now separately if you are looking at an international destination then the data they have right now is people are going there for week long leisure trips and there's not enough business travel for daily flights. That's also common.

[TheMiddleSeat]

One of the simplest ways to look at how Southwest designs their schedule is to consider whether the particular route is utilized mostly by business travelers who need Monday through Friday travel or by leisure travelers who primarily travel on the weekends. The route you are looking at might not have much weekday demand, instead demand is primarily on weekends when leisure travelers do their flying. On routes that are heavily used by business travelers during the week, those routes may have less frequent service on weekends which allows planes to be utilized on the leisure routes.

--TheMiddleSeat

[ZevSupport]

This is greattly explained. ^