Southwest shifts with Hawaii redeyes, Atlanta cuts

Southwest Airlines‘ long-expected redeye service from Hawaii is set to fly. The carrier will launch five routes from the islands to the mainland beginning on 8 April 2025.

Southwest executives have previously pitched the daytime flights as key to serving the west coast market. And it will keep daytime operations to those west coast markets. But the carrier will overfly west coast airports with the overnight trips, bringing passengers to Las Vegas and Phoenix where they will have more options for onward connections to the rest of Southwest’s network.

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The company’s Hawaii service has struggled since launching, with lower load factors. Company executives have defended the service, however, particularly continuing to run the interisland routes. By operating those departures Southwest is able to maintain preferential access to gates in Honolulu. Without that the carrier would likely have trouble keeping its prime daytime departure timings.

But it is willing to shift at least some of those departures around to make the new schedule work. Southwest pitches the redeyes as “new flights” but they are, generally, just retiming of the existing daytime operations.

In Maui the daytime flight to Phoenix becomes a redeye, while the later of the two Vegas flights does the same. In Kona the only mainland flight (to Vegas) moves from 8a to 8:30p. In Honolulu it appears that Las Vegas keeps its two daytime flights and adds a redeye, at the expense of Phoenix, which loses both its daytime flights, one becoming an overnight trip.

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Southwest will also expand its operations in Nashville as part of the April 2025 schedule extension. Service will be added to Albuquerque, NM; Albany, NY; Jackson, MS; Memphis, TN; Providence, RI; and Tulsa, OK. The ABQ-BNA route was last flown in May 1988 while PVD-BNA was last served in 2011. The other four routes are new to Southwest’s operations, including its first intrastate trip in Tennessee.

With the new routes the carrier will reach a peak of 174 Sunday departures, carrying just over half the passengers who depart from Nashville.

That expansion comes against the backdrop of significant cuts in Atlanta. Southwest will give up 7 gates and drop 16 of the 37 current destinations it serves. Weekly departures at ATL will be trimmed from 567 to 381.

Those cuts further the retreat Southwest has staged in Atlanta since it acquired AirTran, ostensibly to establish a beachhead there and in other major cities where AirTran held gates. In 2011, just before the merger, AirTran held a 17% share in Atlanta. Today Southwest is below 10% and continues to shrink.