Southwest Airlines launches its Fresno service this weekend. Here’s what you need to know
Southwest Airlines, the low-cost carrier long coveted by Fresno city leaders and local travelers, will finally spread its wings at Fresno Yosemite International Airport on Sunday. That’s when the city will celebrate its first arrival and departures to two cities in the western U.S.
Southwest’s first flight to Fresno, Flight 739 from Las Vegas, is expected to land at the airport at about 10:30 a.m. Sunday and roll up to its gate at the passenger terminal a few minutes later. The same aircraft, a 143-seat Boeing 737-700 jet, will then depart at about 11:20 a.m. for its return flight, Flight 742, on the 50-minute trip back to McCarran International Airport in Las Vegas.
City leaders including Mayor Jerry Dyer and City Council Member Tyler Maxwell, whose district includes the airport, will be joined by Southwest’s vice president of network planning Adam Decaire for a ribbon-cutting ceremony on the airport ramp prior to the first departure.
After Sunday’s first day of service, with one flight to Denver and an additional flight later to Las Vegas, the airline’s daily schedule will offer three daily flights from Fresno to Las Vegas, with departures at 7 a.m., 11:20 a.m. and 5 p.m., and one daily departure to Denver at 12:30 p.m.
As California’s fifth largest city, Fresno is the largest market in the state that up to now has not been served by Southwest. But, airline spokesman Brad Hawkins said, “Fresno has long been on our radar, if not on our route map.” The airline already flies to and from 12 other airports in California.
Fresno becomes the latest market in a surge of Southwest’s expansion of its route network since the start of 2021, even in the face of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Fresno will be the 11th airport at which the airline has opened new service this year, with six more to follow later in the spring and summer.
Counting on leisure travel
Southwest executives told investment analysts Thursday that the expansion is in part a response the pandemic that has gutted business travel over the past year – and will likely keep demand for business travel tamped down for perhaps five to 10 years.
But while many business travelers have been grounded by the pandemic, the airline is experiencing a recovery in leisure travel. And although the airline lost more than $1 billion in the first quarter of 2021, that’s an improvement from last year’s performance, especially because of leisure travel that began picking up steam in March.
“That highlights the pent-up demand for leisure travel that we’re seeing,” Southwest’s president Tom Nealon said. “We are almost solely reliant on leisure travelers at this point in the recovery.”
Fresno and other new markets are part of that recovery strategy for the airline. Of the new airports where operations have begun, “there’s not a clunker in the bunch,” Nealon said. “All of them are generating new customers, additional revenue and collectively are contributing positively to our cash performance.”
“All the new stations operating today are meeting or exceeding our expectations,” he added.
Local leaders have depicted the arrival of Southwest, after years of wishing, hoping and courting, as “a game-changer” for air travel in Fresno.
“When you think about Southwest Airlines, who have made a commitment to come and fly Fresno, … the future is bright for the city of Fresno when it comes to air transportation out of our city and into our city,” Mayor Jerry Dyer said last week after he toured a new parking garage under construction at the airport.
“When I speak with folks from corporate America, one of the things they want to know about is transportation, connectivity of that transportation to large cities, and the ease of accessing that airport, in and out,” Dyer added. “With all of the transportation modes, with Southwest and Delta and others, there’s an ease of getting to your destination.”
Increased price competition
Southwest’s reputation as a low-fare carrier also bodes well for increasing the competition among airlines at Fresno Yosemite International, which has its own reputation as an expensive place to fly from relative to other California airports.
Of the 12 California airports that rank in among the top 100 in the U.S. for the number of passenger flying in 2020, for example, the U.S. Department of Transportation reports that Fresno had the highest average fare for departing itineraries in the fourth quarter of the year – the cost of all legs of a domestic flight, including connections.
In Fresno, the average itinerary cost, based on a sample of 10% of passengers, was about $323 – almost six percent higher than the second-most expensive airport, San Francisco International.
Earlier this year, when Southwest announced its Fresno plans, Dyer and the city’s director of aviation, Kevin Meikle, said they expected more competitive fares from established airlines.
“It remains to be seen how the airlines react, but I think they’re going to react positively,” Meikle said in January. “I think we’re going to see great fares. … Maybe we’ll see some other movement with other airlines that’s going to further enhance the offerings out of our airport.”
Dyer agreed. “I really believe competition always causes other folks in the industry to step up their game,” he said. “I also believe it’s going to cause them to be more competitive.”
Since Southwest’s January confirmation of its routes in January, several airlines have had short-term promotional sales on flights, while others have added new flights to existing destinations.
In terms of competition, Southwest will be going head-to-head against other airlines that fly from Fresno to both Las Vegas and Denver – Allegiant Air with its service to Las Vegas, and United Airlines and Frontier Airlines, both of which fly to Denver.
Why is Southwest coming now?
For years, Fresno leaders and residents have cast a longing gaze at Southwest Airlines and the prospect of lower ticket prices. But for whatever reasons, the fifth largest city in California did not seem to fit into the airline’s strategy.
The novel coronavirus, and its effects on the travel industry, has changed that for Fresno and other markets that had previously been bypassed by Southwest.
“Prior to the pandemic, we have a practice every year of going through and looking at every place we could fly with our aircraft and evaluating them at least on a desktop, if not an in-person visit,” Southwest executive vice president/chief commercial officer Andrew Watterson said Thursday. “So all these cities are ones that were known to us and evaluated prior to the pandemic.”
For Southwest, which typically expands its route network by a few cities a year, adding Fresno and 16 other markets to the system is a significant shift. “We want to make sure we have enough new cities to cover any potential shortfall” in business travel, Watterson said. “That led us to go at a bigger scale than normal.”
Nealon, the airline’s president, said that what some industry observers might call “small” markets like Fresno make sense now.
“Our rule of thumb (was) we didn’t want to go into a city in the early 1990s unless we thought we could do, say, eight departures a day,” he said., noting that Southwest did not have as large a footprint across the U.S. as it does now. “I do think the fact that we now have such a large U.S. presence makes a lot of these ‘small markets’ much more viable today in terms of flight activity than it did 30 years ago.”
When Southwest sliced its flight schedules last year because of the pandemic, it found itself with an abundance of surplus aircraft. Now, the uptick in demand for leisure travel is allowing the airline to bring more of its jets – and thousands of employees who had taken voluntary leaves – back into service, and the company also has orders for more new aircraft to modernize and expand its fleet.
“We’re delighted that we actually have the capacity to put (Fresno and the other new cities) on the route network here,” Nealon said. “They’re permanent adds and we’re delighted with the performance that we’re seeing.”
Gary Kelly, Southwest’s chairman and CEO, said the new markets are an important part of the airline’s efforts to rebuild financially from the devastation of the past year. The company, he said, will be able to seek ways to not only improve its balance sheet, but take advantage of opportunities to grow.
“We’re in a position where we have that option. We can pay down more debt more quickly, or we can think about expanding more rapidly as compared to some baseline,” Kelly said Thursday. “We would be foolish to pass on what I think is the opportunity of a lifetime to grow this airline in this environment.”
“If, in fact, business travel stays modest over the next five to 10 years,” he added, “we are perfectly positioned to prosper in that environment with our low costs and our low fares.”
This story was originally published April 23, 2021 at 3:39 PM.
