Fours years ago this month, Southwest Airlines (not knowing it at the time) was headed for CVG.
In January of 2013 Frontier Airlines made a surprising announcement that they were leaving the Dayton Airport and were bringing their Denver service to CVG. I remember the “gasp” that went up from many in the airline industry when the announcement was made, especially when Frontier indicated that if the future bookings from CVG warranted it, additional service would be provided.
Additional service? CVG? Didn’t Frontier know that CVG was “the place where low-cost carriers came to die?” After all, several low-cost carriers, including Air Tran (1995-1997) gave the airport a chance and the bookings never reached a level of profitability – in part due to the dominance of Delta Air Lines.
In May of 2013 Frontier started their Cincinnati to Denver service and the competition from Delta was not as fierce and surprisingly the outpouring of support from the community was better than expected. Shortly after Frontier initiated service they announced additional service to Denver would begin. (Note: In seven years Dayton never had more than one flight a day to Denver by Frontier.)
As Frontier continued to flourish another surprise was realized when Allegiant Air announced it too was headed for CVG. The shock here was Allegiant had spent years developing a successful business model, designed around flying in/out of smaller (general aviation) airports and nothing as big as CVG had ever been tried. Allegiant was one of the more profitable airlines (stock price is now $170 per share!) and the idea that they would abandon their proven success model by flying into an airport that had a lackluster history of not supporting low cost carriers seemed fiscally insane. Still, the community responded and Allegiant, just as with Frontier, not only survived…they started the thrive and their service expanded as well. Fast forward four years and you see Frontier with 50 flights a week to 14 destinations and Allegiant with 52 flights each week to 15 different destinations. You can be sure that airlines such as Southwest and others noticed the amount of money that low cost carriers were making at CVG.
Now Southwest Airlines has decided to join the party with 3 flights a day to Baltimore and 5 flights a day to Chicago’s Midway airport and during the press conference on Wednesday the promise was made to increase their service as the demand dictated. So dedicated to the CVG service, Southwest is pulling their service from Dayton to provide low cost service from one of the fastest growing low-cost airports in the country: CVG.
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