Mar
30
If Aloha is unable to find sufficient funds to relaunch its service, who benefits?
A little-known fact about the interisland fare war is that go! took a lot of its market share from Aloha Airlines, while Hawaiian Airlines held onto substantially all of its own market share. With higher labor costs but more fuel-efficient jets than Aloha, Hawaiian can afford to add interisland capacity.
On Sunday afternoon, CEO Mark Dunkerley announced he was adding 6,000 extra interisland seats effective Tuesday — a combination of more flights by the existing interisland fleet and putting one wide-body jetliner into interisland service — to accommodate stranded Aloha passengers.
But that still leaves open the question of what Hawaiian will do in the longer term. It’s not economical to leave a wide-body jet in interisland service forever.
Hawaiian might be content to fill up its remaining seats and leave the rest of Aloha’s interisland traffic to go! and smaller carriers. If it works that way, there could be a little more traffic for go!, Island Air, Pacific Wings and go!Express, while all of them plus Hawaiian could afford to charge more. It wouldn’t necessarily the partially-free ride we’ve had in the fare war, but you might see incremental increases to cover more of the soaring fuel bill.
Jet fuel is an even bigger chunk of interisland flying than long distance flying because most fuel is used taking off, regardless of the length of a flight.
For trans-Pacific service, Hawaiian has an opportunity to pick up some Aloha capacity, but not everywhere.
Take Los Angeles. Hawaiian flies to LAX in competition with virtually every major mainland carrier, while Aloha has flown to John Wayne International Airport in Orange County. I always enjoyed flying that route because John Wayne is never too busy and can walk across the street to your rental car. But Hawaiian’s jets are too big for the runway.
San Diego might be a better opportunity. Hawaiian flies there already but could add capacity to make up for the loss of Aloha, in a healthy market where tourism officials could probably develop more visitor traffic.
Aloha has also served Reno by extending its flights to other cities. I don’t know much about the Reno airport or market but it seemed like Aloha never prospered enough there to maintain direct service.
In his Sunday news conference, asked directly if he was considering expanding to corridors served only by Aloha, Dunkerley replied that he’s not focused on that at the moment but he made a point of mentioning that Hawaiian flies to other cities not far from Aloha markets.
That’s true. Hawaiian doesn’t fly to Orange County but it flies to LAX. It doesn’t fly to Oakland but it flies to SFO and San Jose. It doesn’t fly to Reno but it flies to Sacramento.
Dunkerley has always struck me as a complex thinker. I think he has thought this out, several moves ahead. And I think he has no firm view on what to do, and won’t, until he has a key piece of information: what it would cost him to lease an extra jet or two. And not from Aloha, since those planes are thirsty ones.
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