You know that I love watching the drama between United and American in Chicago, but get ready for a new favorite battle: San Diego. Both Alaska and Southwest appear ready to fight as the new terminal prepares to open. Alaska fired its most recent shot by adding three new routes and increasing frequencies on others.
San Diego is a good market. And, importantly, it’s a constrained one. Yes, it has a single runway, but it also has only one and a half terminals. I say “half” because if you’ve ever been on Southwest flying out of Terminal 1, you know it is barely functional. It is old, and it is woefully undersized. It is very hard to run an operation out of that place.
But at the end of this summer, the new Terminal 1 opens. Not only is it modern with properly-sized holdrooms and all that, but the initial phase will open with 19 gates compared to the 14 in operation today. Once the old Terminal 1 is knocked down, another 11 gates will be built on that footprint to open by 2028. There are also taxiway improvements coming to help increase the flow of aircraft around the small footprint of the airfield. And this means the time has come for airline to step up if they want to be in a good position.
Historically, San Diego has been Southwest’s turf. (Ok, if we go far enough back, it was PSA’s turf, but that’s a little further than I was looking to go in this post.) Southwest is the king of intra-California and has been for decades. That’s why it’s no surprise that for the 12 months ending July 2025, the airline will have 60 percent of its seats in San Diego on flights of less than 500 miles…