Mexican LCC carrier, Volaris, has announced it will begin service to Denver with twice weekly flights starting on the weekends and then moving these flights to daily as the peak season begins.  The airline will serve the route between Mexico City and Denver.

The truly interesting thing in this is what isn’t being said . . . at least not yet.

Volaris is Southwest Airlines’ international partner in Mexico.  The two airlines have a code share of sorts in place today (although it requires purchase of tickets from each airline to get the flight(s) you want.) Southwest is supposed to be working on technical solutions that will allow it to truly do a seamless codeshare with Volaris and other operators.  So far, Southwest has been awfully quiet on this and when asked it generally responds that it has enough on its plate with the Airtran integration.

This would appear to be an opportunity for Southwest to enjoy more feed back and forth with Volaris given how big Southwest is in Denver.  But no one has said a thing about it and it is entirely possible that nothing will be done to expand on it.

I’ve begun to suspect that Southwest has looked at its Volaris opportunities and balanced them against the capabilities that Southwest has bought with Airtran.  Owning Airtran, Southwest is able to institute direct flights to Mexico and control the feed and revenue stream without having to cooperate with another company.  It hasn’t figured out how to codeshare with Airtran operations any better . . . yet.  But there is incentive to do so and it’s notable that in its purchase of Airtran, SWA likely does have a pathway to international operations in Mexico that is more clear.

Furthermore, SWA’s desire to operate Houston Hobby as a kind of “international focus city” to Mexico and Central America signal that it may be more interested in serving those destinations itself.  I think this is exactly what is going on.  Southwest sees opportunity and, more importantly, I think it sees a way to operate to those destinations without necessarily having to establish a large international infrastructure.  It’s notable that SWA flights from Houston to Mexico and Central American destinations could be done without crew layovers in international cities.  They would be international turns.

It’s time someone ask Southwest what it’s plans are for 2013 and what it’s plans are for international destinations.  My bet is a 2015 start date for international operations using a new IT infrastructure.

Filed under: Airline News by ajax