Kurt Ullman wrote:
In article , dpb wrote:

Or maybe not...does Indy subsidize AirTran or another discount carrier
to get that? Wichita does, for example, to the tune of $1M/yr or more.
As a consequence, since they started the other carriers' fares have
come down significantly.


Nope. Just that no single carrier has more than 30-40% of the flights.
We are nobody's hub (like Cincy for instance) so nobody runs enough
flights that they can raise rates.

Even more significant is the volume is sufficient to attract enough
carriers to make it a competitive market so there is more than one
carrier per destination/direction for the most part.

Looking I find Indianapolis is served by 11 airlines averaging 154 daily
departures. Wichita has 43 flights/day.

Smaller markets that struggle to get more than a few carriers have a
much harder time in having any influence on rates--the overall business
is such a small fraction that the carriers really don't care--complain
too much and they'll just leave entirely and never notice the loss in
revenue off past the number of significant digits kept in the summary
P&L statements...

The commercial service out of local airport consists of a morning and
evening flight from/to Denver. That's it. The two slightly larger that
are 60/80 miles do have alternate service to KC as well as Denver. But
the cost of those local fares generally approaches or exceeds that of
the rest of the trip whatever it is.

Still this is a distant sidebar to the point I was after...

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