This trip wouldn’t be complete, however, without a trip report. Allegiant picked up the tab for the flights, so I don’t have exact amounts. I had hoped to fly out of Long Beach both ways, but there wasn’t a flight early enough on the way out so I had to go to LAX. In fact, my talk was originally early enough that I had to do the 6a flight on Southwest. When my talk was pushed back 30 minutes, they moved me an hour later. On the way home, I could still fly back to Long Beach. Both flights were uneventful.

On the way out, I got to LAX at 6a and was thrilled to find the security line inside the terminal. Still, it took me about 20 minutes to get through. My new laptop case was TSA-friendly, as promised, so that was a nice change of pace. By the time I got through, I went over to the cramped gate 2 for the flight.

From the looks of the gate area, this flight was going to be full. It was. We boarded on time and I grabbed a window seat on the right side. This airplane unfortunately had the old seats. I was hoping to try out the new Evolve ones.

From my seat, I saw a very un-Southwest site. There was a mountain of bags outside the window, all with a pink “transfer” sticker on them. Point to point? Not quite. The flight attendants were friendly but were smart enough not to get too cutesy at this early hour. They took drink orders before we pushed back so that they would be ready to go once we were in the air on our short flight.

We took off into the shallow marine layer and you could tell these pilots were enjoying themselves. We climbed quickly and had some sharp turns in there to get us on our course to Vegas. A couple bags of peanuts and pretzels later, we were landing in Vegas. (Unfortunately, it was the lightly salted peanut’s turn instead of honey roasted.)

I was off the plane quickly and on my way to New York, New York, where the event was being held.

I stayed the night in Vegas so I could join the airport folks for dinner and a show (Ka, which is kind of awesome). The next morning, I headed to the airport for my flight back to Long Beach. The line of cars getting into the terminal area was massive. I was reminded that it was mostly cabs coming in to pick up people coming to town – Friday in Vegas. I hopped out of the car as soon as we were near the terminal.

I had checked in the day before but I didn’t have a seat and none were on the seat map except for Even More Space seats and I didn’t want to pay the $15 for the short flight. So I checked in again at the airport, and it just printed out a boarding pass with no seat, saying to go to the gate.

As usual, the security line was insane. It took probably 20 minutes to get through, however, because they move those lines pretty well. The boarding pass said gate D18, but when I walked by D16, it said Long Beach on the board so I stopped there. The agent said no, that was next door and this flight was JFK. Ok.

I went next door and asked for a seat. They had me in a middle in Even More Space. I said, “I assume there are no windows open, right?” She said there actually was one but it didn’t have the extra legroom. I was fine with that. (JetBlue’s normal generous legroom is more than enough for me.)

So I grabbed seat 21F and boarded.

This flight was packed, and it was hot when I boarded. Fortunately it cooled down. We were ready to go on time, but the captain came on and said we’d be delayed 3 or 4 minutes due to “stuff.” Seriously. Really helpful announcement. Despite what the JetBlue flight status showed, we actually didn’t push back until about 15 minutes late. With LiveTV to watch, it was only mildly annoying.

We taxied out to what for me was a rare departure off runway 1R. We bounced out along the desert until we climbed above the heat for the short flight home. JetBlue has an express service so I just had a bottle of water and I passed on the snacks.

It was a very hazy day in the LA Basin, as we descended, but I had still a great view of Lake Arrowhead. Final approach was surprisingly bouncy. I was half expecting a go-around, actually, but he ended up putting us down almost halfway down the runway. We used all of what was left before taxiing back to the gate.

One of the perks of being at the back in Long Beach is that I was able to come down the back stairs. For a dork like me, that’s a great way to end a trip.

The DOT had four slot pairs to give away at National as part of the recent Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) reauthorization. As a quick refresher, National has a rule that prevents any flights longer than 1,250 miles from operating at the close-in airport. About a decade ago, Congress started allowing exemptions, primarily so Congressmen could fly nonstop to get to their home district (my interpretation, at least).

As part of the reauthorization bill this year, eight more slot pairs (one takeoff and one landing) were added to the pool. Four of them were meant for the big incumbent airlines at the airport. These airlines could convert one normal slot to one long haul. Here’s what they did.

• American will start a daily flight to its Los Angeles “cornerstone”
• Delta will add a second daily flight to its Salt Lake hub
• United will start a daily flight to its San Francisco hub
• US Airways will start a daily flight to San Diego

With the stage set, there were four more to give away either to new entrants or limited incumbents. There was a lot of competition for these, so the results weren’t easy to predict. Let’s start with the losers.

• Air Canada wanted to fly to Vancouver, but it’s a small, highly seasonal market.
• Alaska wanted to fly to San Diego, but that was its second choice. Once US Airways announced it would fly the route, this became a tough sell.
• Frontier wanted to fly to Colorado Springs, but that’s a very small market and would have been hard to justify.
• JetBlue wanted to fly to Austin, but that was also a second choice and Southwest put that up as its first choice.
• Sun Country wanted to fly to Vegas, but there are already a lot of flights in that market and Sun Country couldn’t connect people anywhere from there either.

Each of those had a big flaw, especially when compared to the four that seemed to deserve the flights far more. Incredibly, those four are actually the ones that won. Here they are.

• Alaska gets one daily flight to Portland. Portland is the airline’s second hub and has a decent-sized local market. Alaska will not only bring good service to the locals, which are largely loyal to Alaska, but it also adds good connecting options for a lot of small cities. This one seemed like the most obvious winner to me.
• JetBlue gets one daily flight down to San Juan. This one is a great move since JetBlue has been building up its presence in San Juan. This gives nonstop service to a place that will benefit from it, and it also opens up new connecting opportunities into the rest of the Caribbean. I like this route and how it fits into JetBlue’s strategy quite nicely.
• Southwest gets one daily flight to Austin. Nobody flies to Austin from National today and if anyone can serve it well, it’s Southwest. That’s why Southwest was obvious for this route while JetBlue was a longshot. It’s no surprise that Southwest won this.
• Virgin America gets one daily flight to San Francisco. Even though San Francisco will already get its first nonstop to National from United, that certainly won’t be a low fare service. Besides, Virgin America was the only applicant with no service to National, so you had to figure that the airline would get a foot in the door. The airline actually wanted two pairs, but the DOT rightfully shot that down and spread the wealth. This market should do well.

So, for once, I’ll say “good work, DOT.” Something tells me this praise won’t last very long.

If you’d like, you can read the full decision at regulations.gov.

In the Trenches: Wrestling with Business Hours – Intuit Small Business Blog
I’m wrestling with setting “soft” business hours for Cranky Concierge, but I can’t decide if it’s a good plan or not.

Southwest–AirTran Merger: Tech Troubles Are Going to Make It Tough – Conde Nast Daily Traveler
I dive in to some of Southwest’s tech problems and how it’s making the merger more difficult for consumers.

Frontier decided to move its three daily Denver-Houston flights from Intercontinental to Hobby back in November 2010. At the time, the rationale given was that “Hobby offers Frontier’s guests easy access to downtown Houston and many popular tourist attractions in the area.”

For an airline that’s used to competing with United in Denver, that makes sense. This move gave Frontier an opportunity to differentiate itself from United’s service to Intercontinental by going elsewhere. Trying to serve Denver-based travelers meant Frontier was smart to look for a more convenient option. Hobby was also cheaper, but not by a ton. In 2010, the cost per enplanement at Hobby was $9.44 versus $11.06 at Intercontinental.

Here we are less than two years later and Frontier is switching back. What’s changed? A few things, I’d say.

Most importantly, Frontier is a different kind of airline today than it was just two years ago. It is now on its quest to be an ultra low cost carrier. You would think that would mean operating at the lowest cost airport, but the difference between Intercontinental and Hobby is not that great in the scheme of things. (It’s not like the deep chasm between Ft Lauderdale and Miami, for example.)

At Hobby, Frontier could have undercut Southwest. Southwest is hardly the low fare leader it once was, and that might not be hard to do, but what is hard to do is overcome Southwest’s perception as a low fare leader. Southwest’s roots run deep in Houston, and the roots are going deeper every day in Denver as well. If people want to go to or from Houston Hobby, they first think of Southwest. And since Southwest doesn’t participate in any online travel agent systems, people are going directly to Southwest.com to book.

That’s not to say that Frontier couldn’t have won some business by having a lower fare, but there’s just too much noise from Southwest there and it’s probably not a winning battle.

Intercontinental, on the other hand, looks like a low cost carrier’s paradise. It’s not insanely expensive to operate there, but more importantly, as Frontier notes in the second sentence of its press release, “Frontier will be the only domestic low-cost carrier at Bush Intercontinental.” It had to say “domestic” because VivaAerobus flies to Monterrey, Mexico. For the many people who think of Intercontinental first, those who maybe live on the north side or simply think northward, Frontier now has some real opportunity to go in and make some waves without Southwest creating problems.

This is exactly what Spirit has done at O’Hare, DFW, and many more. It goes where the big guys are, where the bulk of the traffic lies, and undercuts the heck out of it.

Frontier is, to be fair, a different animal. (Sorry, I know.) It isn’t quite running that same barebones schedule that Spirit flies. Frontier also can connect people via Denver to a lot of places. It’s something of a hybrid at this point, so United might be more interested in responding. But then again, United might not want to really get into a fare war on what should be a very profitable hub-to-hub route. It’s not like a move by United is really going to push Frontier to walk away from Houston. If Frontier starts growing further in Houston, then maybe United would be more concerned, but it shouldn’t be wasting its time on this one route.

Where does this leave Hobby? It leaves it in the same place we see Love Field, Midway, Oakland, you name it. Southwest has done an incredible job of effectively becoming a monopoly carrier at these airports and that’s a nice position to be in for an airline. Sure, JetBlue is still at Hobby, but would it stay if Southwest started flying from there to LaGuardia? I’m not so sure. Other than that, it’s just regional jets on American to DFW and Delta to Atlanta. Pretty sparse.

So, Southwest will continue to have what’s effectively its own airport on the south side while everyone else stays north.

Houston has two airports with substantial commercial service. The behemoth is Intercontinental. On the north side of town, this was Continental’s home base and now remains one of United’s major hubs post-merger with flights all over the world. There is a heavy emphasis on Latin America, simply due to geography, but you’ll find flights to Europe and Asia as well.

Intercontinental opened in 1969 as a replacement for the old Hobby Airport on the south side of town. Hobby’s story sounds a lot like that of Love Field in Dallas. It’s an older airport (originally built in the 1920s) and it didn’t have room for the growth needed to sustain the Houston metro area. Unlike at Love, however, Southwest didn’t exist when Intercontinental opened.

In 1969 when the new shiny airport opened, all commercial service made the move, but Hobby stayed open for business with general aviation. Since everyone agreed to move, there was no massive, drawn out fight about who could fly where and when as we’ve seen up in Dallas at Love. When Southwest started up in 1971, I believe it even initially went into Intercontinental (though I’m sure someone will correct me if I’m wrong). It wasn’t long, however, before Southwest moved down to Hobby, where it developed a great little niche for itself.

From 1980 until 2005, Southwest actually served both airports, but it finally pulled out from Intercontinental completely in order to focus all efforts on Hobby. Other than Southwest, there are mostly just a few odds and ends at the airport. Frontier flies to Denver and JetBlue flies to New York. American does DFW and Delta goes to Atlanta. That’s about it.

While there has been plenty of noise up in the Metroplex as American and Southwest had fought out which restrictions should remain at Love, Houston was pretty quiet. That’s now changing.

See, Southwest wants to fly internationally and Hobby doesn’t have a customs and immigration facility. Uh oh. Now it’s time for trouble.

Southwest has decided to push hard on this with freehobbyairport.com. It says it wants to use a new 5 gate facility to fly to “Mexico, the Caribbean and the Northern cities in South America.” I should put the emphasis here on “wants” because Southwest still can’t fly internationally thanks to its backwards technology. The airline says that’ll change next year, but I don’t believe it. So really what we’re talking about right now is having AirTran fly internationally until Southwest gets its act together sometime down the road.

This seems like a no-brainer, doesn’t it? I mean, why wouldn’t you want to build a customs facility that will benefit the city and increase service levels? The city of Houston agrees, and that’s important because it runs both Intercontinental and Hobby. So everyone’s happy, right?

Hah, I think you know I wouldn’t be writing about this if that were the case. United is not happy. The airline is in the middle of investing in new facilities at Intercontinental and it is threatening doom and gloom.

United says it will hurt its traffic, and that could result in the city losing service. It also says that this will take away customs and immigration resources from Intercontinental, making for a worse experience for travelers there. Oh please.

These are always the arguments used to fight competition. American used even more ridiculous ones in the Love Field fight, so this shouldn’t be surprising. And it isn’t.

Really, if you’re United, wouldn’t you fight this? I mean, you certainly don’t want more competition, so you should put some effort into trying to keep it out. But in this case, it should be a losing battle. Hobby should get a customs facility, and I imagine that’s what we’re going to see happen.

[Original photo via Flickr user NeitherFanboy/CC 2.0]

The Midwest Cookie Is Dead and Other Important Airline News – Conde Nast Daily Traveler
This week, I did a round up of the death of the Frontier cookie, Spirit’s growth in DFW, and Southwest’s expansion into AirTran markets.

Allegiant Air begins charging passengers for carry-on bags – The Madeleine Brand Show
I was on the show to talk about Allegiant’s new carry on bag fee and had a good discussion.

Dallas Tornadoes and DFW Airport: What Travelers Should Do When Flights Are Cancelled – Conde Nast Daily Traveler
When storms hit DFW this week, scores of flights were canceled and people were stranded. We were able to help our clients get home quickly. Here are suggestions for handling these types of events.

In the Trenches: Hired – Intuit Small Business Blog
It’s finally happened. I’ve hired my first employee. While it was a long road to get here, I’m glad that it’s done.

Continental’s Airline Quality Rating dropped out of Top 10 in 2011 (take our poll) – Cleveland Plain Dealer
I was asked about the Airline Quality Rating, which I don’t put much stock in.

Today, I want to focus on the the three US airlines there and their different strategies. It’s interesting that all may include the Boeing 717 in one way or another.

Delta the Opportunist
I was most interested in hearing from Delta’s VP of Fleet Strategy and Transactions Nathaniel Pieper. You might remember my post addressing why Delta had bought current generation 737-900ERs instead of waiting for next generation airplanes. Certainly Delta’s fleet strategy has differed from other legacy airlines.

I was particularly interested in the rumor broken by Holly Hegeman at PlaneBusiness that Delta would be acquiring the AirTran 717 fleet from Southwest. We didn’t get any details on that in this panel, but after hearing Nathaniel speak, it seems clear to me that the 717 would work quite nicely for Delta considering its strategy.

Nathaniel described Delta’s fleet strategy as one of opportunism. “We have every fleet type known to man.” That’s because Delta will go into the secondary market and buy airplanes if it makes sense. The MD-90 is a perfect example of that. Delta has been acquiring every MD-90 that’s on the market because they’re cheap to acquire and they’re good airplanes that can fly many of Delta’s medium haul missions.

Nathaniel wasn’t afraid to judge others, noting that you “won’t see us enter into a commitment for 460 firm aircraft with 500 options. We’d rather play the game a bit more conservatively, be in the game a bit more frequently and take smaller bites instead of one big chunk.” Hmm, I wonder why he picked that “460″ number. Oh right, that coincidentally matches a certain recent order from American. Heh.

What about airplanes even smaller than the 717? The news is not good. To the surprise of nobody, Nathaniel explained that the “economics of the [50 seat RJ] is very challenging right now.” As if that wasn’t clear enough, he confirmed that Delta would like to shrink that fleet “substantially lower.” What would replace those airplanes? Either fewer flights on bigger jets or some markets might lose service all together.

Hawaiian Loves Its Fleet
Moving over to airlines that actually operate the 717 today, how does Hawaiian feel about the airplane? Peter Ingram, EVP and Chief Commercial Officer for the airline has nothing but love. “For the unique flying we do of 100 to 200 mile hops in the islands, the 717 is very good…. We like the 717 fleet and expect to be in it for this decade at least.”

The more interesting fleet for Hawaiian is that of the bigger jets. In the last two decades, Hawaiian has gone from the L1011 to the DC-10, then to the 767 and now to the A330-200. Why the A330? The airplane apparently has “great economics” to the west coast while at the same time giving more range to reach more places in Asia. Since that’s where Hawaiian has been expanding, this makes a great deal of sense.

Southwest, the Simple Airline
Let’s go from an airline that loves its 717s to one that wants to see them gone yesterday. Did Southwest tip its hat about the fate of the 717 at the airline? No, but the way Brian Hirsham, SVP of Technical Operations spoke, it sounded like the writing is on the wall to me.

Brian explained that the Southwest fleet strategy has two parts. The first part is simplicity. “We realize tremendous synergies by operating a simple fleet.” The 717 hurts that simplicity argument, of course.

The second piece? Flexibility. “We have the ability to flex up and down in terms of fleet size.” Southwest will be retiring 120 737-300/500 “classic” aircraft over the next couple years and replacing them with current generation 737-700/800 instead. But if demand rises, Southwest can simply keep those classic 737s flying longer. And yes, that could happen if, say, Southwest decided to drop an entire fleet type.

In the end, everyone seemed pretty confident with their strategies, and that’s no surprise. A good fleet strategy is key to running an airline. Sometimes, what works for one airline might not for another. And that’s why I’m keeping a close eye on those AirTran 717s…

[Photo via Flickr user redlegsfan21/CCSA 2.0]

What’s so unique about this merger is that AirTran truly is disappearing. This isn’t a “merger of equals” or anything else like we’ve seen in other big mergers. This is Southwest taking AirTran and turning its assets into Southwest. Because of that, the transition can occur much more easily. Effectively, this is how it will work.

Southwest has already started slowly canceling AirTran flights and re-creating them as Southwest flights. For example, today, AirTran operates three flights between LA and Atlanta while Southwest has none. Flash forward to a Tuesday in September and there are now three daily flights on Southwest as well as one single redeye on AirTran. So Southwest replaces the AirTran flights and has the ability to grow a little as well.

If you fly on an AirTran flight, you’ll get the AirTran onboard product. There will be business class, assigned seats, bag fees, etc. If you fly on a Southwest flight, you get the Southwest product with open seating, all coach, and no bag fees. Over time, all the AirTran flights will disappear and the Southwest flights will be the only ones to remain.

It seems so simple, and really, it is. Southwest has dramatically reduced the number of AirTran flights starting this summer (from 680 daily departures on a Friday all the way down to 568). This will allow the airline to start pulling out airplanes from the AirTran fleet to send them through the car wash where they’ll come out looking exactly like Southwest airplanes inside and out. At the same time, crews will begin coming over from AirTran to Southwest. They’ll get training and will be assimilated into the Southwest operation.

If you’re a cook, it’s like slowly adding an ingredient and mixing as you go instead of just dumping everything in at once. It just makes a lot of sense to do it that.

So why can Southwest do this so effortlessly and the others can’t? Because the other mergers are completely different animals. Whether it was America West/US Airways, Delta/Northwest, or Continental/United, these were all true mergers in the sense that they took bits and pieces from each other to create the new combined airline. Think about the harmonization of the frequent flier program as just one piece of the pie. There isn’t one airline that stays the same in these mergers, but there is in the Southwest/AirTran merger. AirTran is effectively disappearing and will leave barely a trace, and that allows Southwest to gradually phase it out without making any big changes to the surviving operation along the way.

I’m not exaggerating when I say tat AirTran is disappearing. According to Southwest spokesperson Chris Mainz, “we haven’t announced or decided on anything concrete that we plan to pull over from AirTran and incorporate into Southwest.” There will be some things behind the scenes that need to come over. For example, Southwest isn’t capable of flying internationally but AirTran can. That not a customer-facing issue, but it is something Southwest will need to incorporate behind the scenes to allow it to fly internationally. That’s why I imagine that toward the very the end, AirTran will just be a collection of international flights and redeyes, the two things that Southwest doesn’t do today. (Southwest has said that some limited redeyes are likely to come over.)

In the meantime, Southwest and AirTran continue to operate separately with Southwest getting bigger and AirTran getting smaller. There are efforts to connect the two systems with codesharing, but Southwest’s technology team is the hold-up. It can’t codeshare yet, despite years of trying. The plan is to have that up and running sometime in the near future, and that will make it easier to transition AirTran out slowly without completely killing the feed in the Atlanta hub.

Meanwhile, Southwest is doing what it can to relocate AirTran flights to be near Southwest in airports around the US so they can operate together, even as they continue to operate as two separate airlines.

[Original Southwest photo via Flickr user fdenardo1/Original AirTran photo via Flickr user PhillipC/Original Car Wash photo via Flickr user Ralph Hockens/All via CC 2.0]