Frontier Airlines Tries To Diversify Away From Denver . . . Again

Since the dawn of time (or maybe not quite that long), Frontier has searched for a way to diversify beyond its Denver hub. There have been plenty of efforts, but now it appears that Florida is the latest attempt. Frontier will open up flights between Oklahoma and Florida.

In the past, we’ve seen Frontier try to get away from Denver on a few occasions. There was the ill-fated effort in LA that saw flights to places like Cabo, San Francisco, Kansas City, St Louis and Minneapolis. That failed. There was also the very small mini-hub effort in Memphis that went to Vegas, Orlando, and Ft Lauderdale. Northwest killed that one quite efficiently.

The only attempt to go beyond Denver that has worked has been flights to Mexico. The network had grown to connect many heartland cities to Mexican beach destinations that were already served from Denver. The network had been pared down as demand dropped, but recently there have been new flights added again.

The Florida move appears to be similar to the Mexico strategy, so I imagine it has a decent chance of success. On January 15, Frontier will start flying 4 to 5 times a week from Oklahoma City to Orlando and twice a week from Oklahoma City to Tampa. These will be flown by ~100 seat Embraer 190 aircraft - something that is only possible now that Republic can move airplanes around between its subsidiaries.

So do I think this is the beginning of a new Oklahoma City hub? No, I doubt it. This just seems to be opportunistic. Nobody flies these routes nonstop, unlike in the Memphis and LAX efforts, so with small enough airplanes and few enough flights per week, it might just work. Seems similar to the Allegiant Air strategy except it’s not small market to big leisure market. It’s mid-size market to big leisure market. Those planes are a lot more expensive so they’ll need to get some good revenue to make it work.

It if does, I imagine we’ll see this spread to other Frontier cities.