32. Why doesn't Southwest fly to Hawaii?
Please see
FAQ 25 for an up-to-date discussion of service to Hawaii provided through Southwest's partnership with ATA. The discussion here predates that partnership and is presented to provide a perspective on why Southwest has chosen not to serve Hawaii itself.
a. (verhalen) It's not "worthwhile" because it would break their cost model. WN cannot afford the costs that a Hawaii operation would bring, under their current cost model, unless they flew something like 40 flights per day there, which is not realistic.
b. (JS) The problem with Hawaii is that you need heavy overwater equipment (ETOPS and life rafts). WN wants all of its planes available for use anywhere in the system.
c. (Stefan Daystrom) They don't add airports unless they can justify at least 10 flights a day from that airport, spread over several destinations, typically a mix of the closest ones outside of 3 hour driving time and one or more of their semi-hubs (Baltimore, Chicago, Phoenix, Las Vegas, Orlando, etc). So it's unrealistic to just look at whether Southwest could fly to
somewhere from Hawaii or Alaska, but whether they could fly
often enough to
enough different destinations from there to make starting service there (on their point-to-point model) practical.
Another problem is Rapid Rewards. It's not set up to handle a destination that "should" cost more than other destinations. One Rapid Reward ticket gets you anywhere that Southwest flies. That system would start breaking down if they flew to Hawaii (for which miles-based carriers typically charge more miles than for a continental US/Canada award ticket, for example 35000 miles to Hawaii while 25000 miles within continental US/Canada at AA). It would thus keep Southwest's costs up, because if they didn't institute capacity controls on their awards (which they ended up doing February 2006), they'd never make money on the Hawaii flights because it'd be all awards.
d. (nsx) The obvious fix for this would be requiring two RR awards for Hawaii, perhaps allowing one award if departing from the west coast. In fact, the RR Terms and Conditions state: "Ticketless Awards and paper Awards are valid for one roundtrip to any city Southwest Airlines serves in the
continental U.S." (italics are mine) Apparently, WN is allowing for the possibility of adding service to Alaska, Hawaii, or the Caribbean. Hawaii service would require double connections from some WN cities, so the systems would need to change to support double connections (which they do already for some RR travel from DAL).
The biggest problem with Hawaii is logistics: you need enough flights to justify having a maintenance base and other ground staff. Because of its isolation, Hawaii cannot easily accommodate flights spread out over the day. (737s can reach Hawaii from only a limited subset of current Southwest cities.) Another challenge from a business perspective is the high fraction of leisure vs. business travelers. But that didn't keep WN out of Orlando.
Hawaii would probably not show a profit by itself, but it could provide a HUGE boost to business travel elsewhere in the system. Lack of awards to Hawaii is a deal-breaker to a significant percentage of frequent fliers who could bring WN a lot of revenue. Probably the same reasoning applied when WN was thinking about adding MCO.