Mackenzie Click-Mickelson
Chugging along the path of life
- Joined
- Oct 23, 2015
- Messages
- 31,015
Agreed.This makes me really sad. SW was really the only airline that had daily non stop flights to MCO out of STL. Frontier has some, but only on select days, same with Spirit. I just checked Google flights for our next trip and there isn't a single non stop flight. SW hasn't released theirs yet that far out. But Delta, American, United and Alaskan airlines all have at least 1 stop. Making what is normally a 2.5 hour flight anywhere from almost 5 hours to 16 hours. And the cheapest option of those is still $587 on Delta.
If I look at Delta (who is normally the next competitor for KC) their flight options are below
Saturday going to Costa Rica


Saturday on the way back to KC

Sunday going to Costa Rica and a limitation for that would be it's just one flight

Sunday on the way back to KC and you can't argue that SWA has more flight options because all of them for this particular Sunday are the same flight out of Costa Rica and that happens to be the same case with Delta

Now I do think the thing to bring up is that Delta is doing Basic attachments to its fares eventually all the way up to Delta One so they are going to squeeze more money out of people that way but just looking at their schedules they do not have this nutty 3/4ths+ part of a day schedules at least comparing same destination.
I will say specifically MCO SWA still has a good amount of non-stops to/from KC for now (roughly 4 on a Saturday or Sunday for same dates in May as Costa Rica for easy looking) but their schedules aren't nearly as convenient as they used to be. I know some people could look at Costa Rica which I used simply because we are going there as a "well it's just the location" but it's not when you have 1 plane taking everyone from there and the splitting off into crazy talk total trip durations. Who in their right mind is going to choose SWA for an 18hr trip when Delta with roughly the same leaving time from Costa Rica and can do it in 8hrs? And is that really optimizing their resources? The pricing was not really different between the options either.