Since I wrote this post HERE in mid January, I’ve kept an eye on airfares between these two cities.  A check made yesterday revealed that advanced purchase (and not too advanced as in less than 30 day) fares are now at $158.00 on American Airlines and Airtran.  They are a few dollars higher on Midwest and a few more dollars higher on the Frontier flight that is actually the Midwest flight. 

Airtran hasn’t started these flights yet and when they do, they’re planning to use SkyWest CRJ-200 aircraft for those trips.  Not the most comfortable airliner for 2+ hours of flight.  It’s interesting to note that since I last visited this subject, AA has upgraded its equipment to CRJ-700 aircraft on most of the flights with just one ERJ-145 remaining.  Midwest/Frontier continues to use Embraer E-170 equipment and both those aircraft are quite tolerable for the trip. 

Even more interesting, Southwest Airlines is now offering not one but two “direct” flights with no plane change between the two cities and their cheapest available fares match Airtran’s offerings.   The flight times are 3 hours, 10 minutes which is just shy of an hour more than the others nominally.  In other words, they’ve shortened up the transit time by 20 minutes and when you consider where you live in Dallas, flying through Love Field just might make that a wash at this point.  You also get to fly a mainline Boeing 737 instead of a regional jet.  The real kicker is no bag fees on Southwest which, in many cases, makes Southwest the cheaper flight and potentially no longer than the others “door to door” for many in the Dallas area. 

I would say that if Airtran does expect to keep this route, the CRJ-200 isn’t going to be adequate for that route.  They’ll need to offer the kind of service they have on their B717 aircraft to siphon away traffic from both AA and Midwest.

Filed under: Airline Service, Travel Hints by ajax