Frontier Airlines has been trying some rather weird destinations over the last year.  Weird for this airline and weird for any airline.

The airline has started flights into Trenton, NJ for instance.  Now it’s just announced Wilmington, Delaware as an alternative to Philadelphia and Baltimore’s main airports.

When a company is running around and trying very hard to go head to head with competitors, there is a problem.  Frontier has been killed in Milwaukee and has been roughed up badly in Denver, it’s home base.  Other focus cities have been discontinued but there is something more going on here.

I don’t know what this airline does anymore.

I don’t know what service level it offers, I can’t identify a market it has aligned itself with and it is getting hard to figure out where the airline flies to.  These airport choices defy explanation to me.  Wilmington, DE might seem like a decent alternative to Philadelphia until you realize that those 30 miles separating the two airports represents a significant inconvenience to most in the Philadelphia area.  It’s a matter of traffic and logistcs.  30 miles isn’t 30 minutes of travel.  It’s not even 60 minutes of travel in many cases.  It’s considerably more and people in that city don’t need more complications.

More importantly, the people of Philadelphia aren’t screaming for low fares either.  Nor is Baltimore.

How this airline is hanging on at this point defies my imagination.  The fact that Republic can’t even sell this airline says something.

I honestly believe that if David Neeleman were still running JetBlue, he would have bought both Frontier and Virgin America and merged them into a national domestic airline.  But Neeleman isn’t around and no other airline executive exists with enough vision and courage to make something like that work.

As much as I want regional mainline airlines to exist, I can’t find a good argument for Frontier at this point.  Who flies them and why do they bother?

Filed under: Airline News, Airline Service by ajax
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