Southwest seeks to break Hawaiian’s inter-island grip

Bloomberg

Southwest Airlines Co. plans to challenge Hawaiian Airlines for control of Hawaii’s island-hopping market shortly after beginning flights to the state from the mainland.
The short, high-demand, inter-island flights are squarely within Southwest’s wheelhouse, Southwest revenue chief Andrew Watterson said in an interview.
“We see that big market with higher price points and it’s short haul, which is what we’re known for,” said Watterson, who was at Hawaiian Holdings Inc. before joining Southwest in 2013. “The size of the market and the prices led us to see that we can do it profitably.”
The Dallas-based discounter will enter a market littered with the ghosts of other airlines that took on Hawaiian and failed. Island Air ceased flying after filing for bankruptcy in 2017, a fate shared by Aloha Air in 2008. Mesa Air ended operations of its Go! discount unit in 2014. Southwest hasn’t disclosed when it will start flying to or within Hawaii, having received regulatory approval just this week.
The carrier will fly the 175-seat Boeing Co. 737-800, shifting later to the 737 Max carrying the same number of passengers. Hawaiian operates Boeing 717s with 128 seats between the islands, while its Ohana commuter unit uses 48-seat turboprops.
“If you look at the history of inter-island flying, it works with one,” said Andrew Harrison, ch-ief commercial officer of Alaska Air Group Inc., which flies to Hawaii but not between islands.