Spirit Airlines has announced new routes from DFW to San Diego, Detroit and Toluca/Mexico City to start on June 21st.  I’m pleased about the competition but I still remain uninterested in flying on Spirit myself.  The ULCC carrier clearly sees opportunity in the DFW marketplace and I think they are right.

Spirit isn’t going to kill American Airlines on those routes although its notable that American is the dominant carrier on all three.  It’s likely to siphon off extremely low value passengers from AA and perhaps even a few from Southwest Airlines.

I like the competition showing up because I think some pressure could be applied to American Airlines on many of its routes.

I suspect we’ll see other LCC carriers such as Virgin America and JetBlue make more overtures to DFW with more routes over time.  The airport has the space and let’s not forget that American will almost certainly shrink at the airport in terms of terminal space and will remain very limited in its response to this competition for the next 12+ months.

Filed under: Airline News by ajax
No Comments »