We received a note from one of our readers last week, pointing out that I neglected to point out in our note about Southwest moving back to SFO, that this is yet another move by Southwest into a United stronghold.

Shame on me. Must be all that King Cake I’ve been munching on of late. It has slowed my brain activity. Thankfully Mardi Gras is next week, so I won’t have to see anymore of it after that.

But yes, of course he’s right.

While he agreed that the pre-entry news was clearly a direct warning shot aimed at Virgin, the bigger impact is going to be on United, and to a lesser extent, Frontier.



Think about it. United is now plane-constrained, so they aren’t going to be able to go after Southwest to much extent out of SFO. Furthermore this is the third major United hub Southwest has gone into of late. Denver, Dulles, now San Francisco.

“In sum, I don’t see this as being directed at JetBlue much at all. The only places JetBlue flies to SFO from are places that Southwest probably won’t be in for the foreseeable future: JFK and BOS. In fact this is more Southwest looking at what JetBlue is doing and saying “hey, what a good idea, let’s try that ourselves…”

As for Frontier, if Southwest decides to set up San Francisco- LAX service, Frontier’s attempts to get their SFO/LAX service off the ground will probably come to a grinding halt.

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