It is easy to look at the four new routes Southwest Airlines announced out of Orlando this week in disbelief. How is it reasonable to add double-daily traffic in the crowded South Florida airspace to a handful of airports all less than 200 miles away? That question is doubly interesting when high speed rail (such as it exists in the US) now runs reliably between Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Palm Beach, and Orlando, with plans for a Tampa extension underway. And yet here we are.
NEW: Southwest Airlines will add 4 new routes from Orlando (MCO) to cities within Florida:• MCO to Fort Myers (RSW)• MCO to Miami (MIA)• MCO to Sarasota (SRQ)• MCO to West Palm Beach (PBI)All will operate 2x daily starting in August. These join MCO-FLL.
— Ishrion Aviation (@ishrionaviation.bsky.social) 2024-12-12T13:19:30.366Z
The routes are silly on the surface. But, like most short flights in the US, they are not about serving the local market; they are about onward connections. And there are a LOT of onward connections in play, thanks to Orlando’s position as a hub for Southwest.
Take Palm Beach, for example. Depending on the month it offers nonstop service to less than a half dozen destinations on Southwest, and not all of those run daily. Orlando adds roughly 50 more airports with a one stop connection.
Map generated by the Great Circle Mapper - copyright © Karl L. Swartz.
That is the most extreme example of these new markets, but the others are similar, as shown in these maps.
Map generated by the Great Circle Mapper - copyright © Karl L. Swartz.
Map generated by the Great Circle Mapper - copyright © Karl L. Swartz.
Map generated by the Great Circle Mapper - copyright © Karl L. Swartz.
It would be great if intermodal transport worked better in the US and the systems were robust enough to support this demand without the terribly inefficient flight options. But Southwest was clear that Orlando would be a significant hub for its operations, while Atlanta is shrinking from that role. his shows just how that shift can play out.
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What evidence makes you so confident that these additions are not about serving local markets in some way? Lots of Floridians choose to simply drive between those cities once they see how high the airfares are, and even the Brightline train stopped selling passes because too many in-state commuters wanted them.
WN sells about a dozen seats on FLL-MCO daily each way (PDEW) today per Cirium data. It is adding about 350 daily seats in each of these markets. Even if a couple dozen people use this option for local traffic, the onward connection value is significant.
AA carries about 100 PDEW while flying 1,400 seats each way MIA-MCO. That’s a lot of connecting demand.