WN to DEN!!

Big news today. Southwest Airlines announced today they will begin service to Denver next year.

This is good news for me, because conceviabley I will have my choice of 6 different airlines (ATA, Froniter, American, Southwest, United, and Ted) flying non-stop to 2 Chicago airports. Wow! This should really bring fares down. Its always been relatively cheap to fly to O'Hare or Midway, but lately the cost has been going up.

It'll be interesting to see what happens with ATA's gates and service out of DEN. They've always had 4 daily non stops to Midway. Recently, they started a non-stop DEN-PHX on a 757. Given TZ's bankruptcy protection, code-share agreement with WN and the routes they recently dropped, I wouldn't be surprised if we see ATA disappear from DIA by next year.

I'm also curious to see what effect this will have on Frontier. Seemingly, WN will not affect Frontiers operations overall (at least in the beginning)--there just isn't the space at DIA for another airline to come in and take a huge chunk of gates. You could argue that Southwest can get you to as many cities as F9 can, but Frontier can do them all non-stop on a brand new Airbus A319 or A318 with PTVs at every seat. Southwest will just move you on like steerage and play the hokey pokey with you.

Stay tuned...this should be interesting.