Chicago – Just a matter of time
Posted on 07/19/2006
I just got an email from a blog reader inquiring to why he cannot get a low fare from CAK to Chicago, despite the fact that we have low fares to so many other places. First of all, we have a very limited amount of seats going to Chicago O’Hare (ORD). 150 seats a day is not very many to serve such a populated market. United, who provides these seats has a few seats to ORD at a low fare, but for the most part is more interested in filling these seats with premium international passengers who pay higher fares to connect through ORD. Could United add more seats to the market?Not very easily; ORD is capacity constrained so new flights can’t be addes, so there is not much potential for us at ORD!
How about Midway? Midway (MDW) presents our greatest opportunity but in the short run MDW also has some problems. First of all our success has been adding service to city pairs that have been traditionally overpriced and underserved out of Northeast Ohio. MDW is not one of these markets. Currently Southwest, Continental, United and American provide 34 flights a day from CLE to ORD and/or MDW at very low prices. Even with these low prices, load factors from CLE are quite low. In fact, Southwest the load factor from CLE to MDW in April was a stunning 55.8%!! And it never runs above 66%, even in the very highest months.
As you can see, adding additional lift to Chicago under the current circumstances is not attractive to a new carrier when even Southwest is doing poorly on the route.Keep in mind that Southwest carries connecting passengers as well as local Chicago traffic so the percentage of seats filled with passengers going just to Chicago is very low. Fortunately, these circumstances will not stay this way forever. Seats will come out of the market and fares will go up. This summer, United and American have taken about 1,800 seats a week out of the market already.In order to change the route structure here, we just need to see more seats come out and we will. It’s just a matter of time!
