Southwest Airlines chief executive Gary Kelly said the carrier plans to continue to add flights this year, but is hesitant to make a firm commitment on new gates to be built at Denver International Airport.
“We’ll want to grow Denver at the right pace,” Kelly said after speaking at a Chief Executive Network conference at the Grand Hyatt in downtown Denver today morning. Though other airlines may compete for the eight or more additional gates DIA plans to build on Concourse C, where Southwest operates, “At this point we’re just taking our chances that we’ll get what we need without making any costly commitment.”
Southwest is taking on a fifth gate at DIA and recently announced new flights from Denver to Oakland to start in June. By then, it will fly to 11 cities from Denver.
But Southwest’s Denver flights are not as full as they were when the carrier first started flying to Denver in January 2006, Kelly acknowledged.
“Our load factors are down only because we’ve added more flights and we simply haven’t absorbed those new flights yet,” Kelly said. “The traffic is growing.”
While in other markets, Southwest started with about a dozen flights and kept its presence relatively small until planes filled up, in Denver, “we decided to deviate from that strategy,” adding flights more quickly.
He said Southwest Airlines is considering additional services to better compete with growing low-fare competition. Options the company is considering include assigned seating and in-flight entertainment.
In Denver, “United is obviously the largest competitor with the most flights, and they’re a very formidable competitor in that sense,” Kelly said. “Frontier has a strong brand and is also a very formidable, very able competitor,” he said.
Staff writer Kelly Yamanouchi can be reached at 303-954-1488 or at kyamanouchi@denverpost.com .
