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Rick Seaney on Southwest Airline Plans to Acquire AirTran
Super interesting story today, Southwest acquiring AirTran, a huge deal between two mega low cost airlines making an ultra size low cost airline. This is just a week after United and Continental stockholders basically approve that merger. It’s going to take a while for it all to happen but this is a huge deal. You’ve got basically Southwest with about 70 cities, AirTran with 70 cities. The combine airline will have just over 100 cities for Southwest, frequent flyers what a deal.
We now have five destinations that are really cool if you want to do your frequent flyer words place like Punta Cana, Cancun, San Juan, Aruba, and Montego Bay, really cool for you guys out there. So what we see here is some overlap in some cities that are going to be really interesting to see what happens. You got Baltimore, Orlando and Milwaukee with a pretty good overlap with Southwest, so you know it’s a possible pairs. It can actually go up there because they won’t be fighting it out against each other.
Another interesting thing about this new proposed acquisition that AirTran has a bag fee, Southwest doesn’t have bag fee. We’ll have to see what happens there. My guess is Southwest up to this third round of bag fee commercial and the bag police that there is no way AirTran is going to keep their bag fee. They also have the chance fee, Southwest doesn’t have that so will see what happens there.
Another interesting thing about the merger as well is if Southwest does not participate in online travel agency like Expedia, Orbitz, Travelocity, AirTran does so try to see what happens there and what plays out there. Meanwhile, this is going to be big deal. Southwest goes into Atlanta head to head with BelAir. That’s going to be huge deal, so big time merger today, more details as we get later in the day, stay tune on Fare Compare media channel.
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