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Adding more flights

hulababy12
Explorer C

Since Southwest starting servicing the Hawaiian Islands, the flights sold out pretty quickly.  I'm hoping the Executives at Southwest see the demand and add more flights to Hawaii.  Not only would that benefit their bottom line but also customers who love flying Southwest.

4 REPLIES 4

Re: Adding more flights

dfwskier
Aviator A
Solution

You can be sure tha Southwest will add more service to Hawaii. That has always been the plan.

 

The proces probably slowed down due to the Max8 grounding. Southwest has 34 of those planes in the fleet. Although none were being used on service to Hawaii, I would suspect that other planes are being used to sub for those Max8s that have been pulled from serivice.

Re: Adding more flights

SWDigits
Aviator A
A couple of links here with additional context and insight to how Southwest seems to be approaching the expansion:

  • "Additional service details, including plans for previously announced gateways of San Diego and Sacramento, and for Lihue, on Kauai, will be announced in the coming weeks."

    Source is Southwest press release: https://www.swamedia.com/releases/release-bc94d941a090ea44998912da1fdcc705-hawaii-here-we-come

  • Item 5 in the following link (non-Southwest source so I can't vouch for the accuracy) describes the approach to inter-island service:

    https://beatofhawaii.com/southwest-hawaii-inter-island/


  • My guess is that they want to get a feel for how things are going, identify issues, test pricing etc. then they'll continue to add until they get to a fully optimized schedule of both flights to/from the mainland that integrate the aircraft nicely for inter-island flights. I'm guessing that flights from Hawaii to points beyond the West coast are also somewhere on the wish list too.

    Customer | Home airport DCA

    Re: Adding more flights

    SWDigits
    Aviator A
    One more related quote from the end of the following article (bold emphasis added by me):

    “Well, let’s take one step at a time. Hawaii is already a big deal for us. It’ll take us this year and next to fully build it out,” Watterson said. “We’ll concentrate on that first, get that under our belt, and then figure out where else we can go in the world.”

    Source:
    https://www.bizjournals.com/dallas/news/2019/03/19/southwest-airlines-europe.html

    Customer | Home airport DCA

    Re: Adding more flights

    chgoflyer
    Aviator A

    The ramp-up in service to Hawaii was initially planned to take all of this year and into next year. I suspect that the grounding of MAX aircraft, which Southwest had stated would be used eventually for Hawaii, will slow things down and push back some planned expansion. Southwest never completed ETOPS certification on MAX, and I believe that is now on hold until the planes are allowed to fly again.