Route cuts force some Southwest loyalists in Atlanta to look elsewhere

“Southwest never gave me a reason to shop around,” he said. It was affordable and convenient. It had the nonstop routes he needed to Los Angeles, New York and South Florida, he said.

Even when his mother got caught up in the airline’s holiday operational meltdown in 2022, the company made it up with extra rewards points.

“It was just my go-to … but this is the first time I’ve been shopping around for domestic flights.”

“Morale is very uneasy as we’ve watched other carriers come into Atlanta,” said Alison Head, an Atlanta-based flight attendant for Southwest who represents the base on the Transport Workers Union’s executive board.

She pointed to recent route additions from Spirit, Frontier and Avelo Airlines. “While we pretty much had one side of the C Concourse at one point,” she said, they’re now down to about 11 gates.

Indeed, Hartsfield-Jackson has converted some of Southwest’s prior C Concourse gates into shared use “to better support current airline activity and optimize concourse utilization,” confirmed Becky Francosky, director of air service data analytics, research and reporting, in a statement.

Losing the nonstop routes Gasana took frequently to see family in South Florida was the final straw, he said. Connecting through Charlotte doesn’t make any sense. “They lost a customer,” he said of Southwest.

Now he’s having to turn to Atlanta-based Delta Air Lines, which, with its partners, flies about 80% of Hartsfield-Jackson’s capacity.

His Delta loyalist friends “have always kind of been nudging me to do it,” he said. “Maybe they got me now.”

Southwest’s Atlanta route cuts have heavily affected South Florida, confirmed Head.

The airline also closed its satellite base in Fort Lauderdale, she said, which has made it difficult for flight attendants commuting to Atlanta from the area to get to work.

“In order to get back to Atlanta as an employee or even a customer, you do have to use another airline unless you want to connect through another city,” she said.

While Southwest previously said about 200 Atlanta-based flight attendants would have to move out of the base, just 55 have actually been forced to, she said.

Twelve have voluntarily chosen to change bases, including to nearby Nashville, where the company has added some capacity, she said.

According to the Southwest Airlines Pilot Association, 116 pilots have switched out of Atlanta because of the cuts, 83 of whom were not voluntary.

Clinging to the No. 2 spot

Southwest has been the second-largest carrier in Atlanta since merging with AirTran Airways more than a decade ago.

The Dallas-based airline narrowly held that No. 2 spot in April, with 4.6% of total Atlanta flight capacity — just ahead of Frontier’s 3.75%. But that’s before Frontier launched new routes in May and June.

A Frontier spokesperson confirmed to the AJC the airline expects to be Atlanta’s second-largest carrier in terms of total seats in June.

Southwest had 119 departures a day from Atlanta last spring, 8.6% of Atlanta capacity in April of 2024.

This summer, it will have about 55-60 flights on peak days, a spokesperson told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

The airline has been under increasing pressure to improve its financial performance, particularly exacerbated by manufacturing delays with its aircraft supplier, Boeing.

“We feel like we’re up against Wall Street,” Head said. “Southwest has always been known for the ‘LUV,’ (its stock market ticker symbol) and we feel like they’re not willing to protect the ‘LUV’ like they once were.”

Gasana said even though he’s had to turn to Delta, he’s hopeful that Southwest will sort out its business model and someday restore its Atlanta routes.

“I’ve been with them for so long. I’m holding out hope that they’ll come around,” he said.

Head said she, too, is “hopeful that we will be able to turn things around. Because you have employees who have dedicated their entire careers to this company.”

“While we might feel that the company is doing the absolute minimum at the moment as they make changes, and it’s uncertainty for a lot of us all, (flight attendants) are here to do everything we can.”

She is optimistic that an impending switch to assigned seating, for example, might help customer interest.

In the meantime, Delta and other airlines are reaching out to Southwest loyalists like Gasana with open arms: The Atlanta carrier is offering a status match deal to Rapid Rewards members through September.