Suddenly, there are small signs everywhere about the Southwest Airlines / Airtran Airways integration.  It Kansas City, Airtran is moving over to Southwest’s terminal and occupying SWA gates marked for their use.  A good move, in my opinion, because it starts associating Southwest with Airtran sooner rather than later.

Southwest has also kicked off a One LUV tour that recently stopped in Atlanta.  SWA employees visited Airtran crew areas at the airport to answer questions and generally welcome Airtran to the family.  Also a good move because it’s those face to face contacts that begin the formation of relationships that will be needed as the two airlines combine together more and more.

Wichita, Kansas has approved a move to continue subsidizing Airtran flights into and out of Wichita.  Wichita has wanted Southwest flights for a long, long time and this move seems oriented towards at least getting Southwest to try out Wichita for a brief while.   Currently, Airtran serves Wichita with flights to Atlanta only but perhaps Southwest will try out flights to other destinations that make more sense for Wichita such as Denver, Chicago or Dallas. 

I’m sure we’ll see more signs of integration over the next few months as well.  For instance, it would be relatively easy to move operations within the Southwest fold in Minneapolis, Chicago, Milwaukee, Baltimore, Denver and, well, you get the idea.  Except where space is an issue, I think we’ll see Airtran flights start moving into and out of Southwest gates instead.  There is a lot of overlap in this area and the only places where it might be tough are in those focus cities where Southwest is already constrained with gate space.

Filed under: Airline News by ajax