Dallas Market Numbers and Comparo's

[swamt]

Some very interesting numbers and comparo's in this article about the Dallas market. 
A couple of points that actually thru me is Spirit has surpassed Delta in the number of passengers (% of seats) offered. Spirit is now #2 at DFW. The other is the % of seats in USA, SWA is now tied head to head with Delta at 21.4%. Will Delta get moved to #3 in this area as well?  
In the second article SWA carried 135 million passengers in 2014. Coming to 1/5 of the entire US market. Will be even more interesting to see where we land for 2015 as with all the growth in 2015. Record numbers keep coming in and hoping they will continue for years to come.
 
US major airlines recognise the ULCC threat. Marketplace dynamics will change. But beware cost ...
 
Why Are Customers Choosing Southwest Over Its Competitors?

 

[FWAAA]

I don't know who Sean Ross is (author of the Investopedia article), but the article is full of errors and misleading conclusions.  Here are a couple of the more glaring ones:
 

The airline has turned a profit every year of its 40-plus year existence, and its fundamentals look as strong as ever.[/size]

 
I don't believe that's accurate, as there were early losses.   WN does have a 40+ year unbroken string of profits since the first profitable year.  
 

Southwest went unhedged in 2015, allowing it to take full advantage of declines in crude oil.[/size]

 
Uhh, I don't think that's accurate, either.   WN may not have entered into any new hedges during 2015, but it still has $1.2 billion of bad hedges still on the books (contracts that will settle over the next 2-3 years) and if fuel prices don't increase substantially, that's over a billion dollars that WN will give to the counterparties of those hedge contracts.   WN isn't getting "full advantage" of the decline in fuel prices - it's sharing the benefits with the other side.  DL had to share almost $2 billion of the fuel price decline with its hedge counterparties over the past year, so WN is in good company.[/size]
 
The next one is kind of pedantic, but here goes:[/size]

Southwest carried nearly 135 million passengers in 2014, the most among all airlines and roughly one-fifth of the entire U.S. industry.[/size]

 
What he said above is technically true, but only in ways that an autistic person could appreciate, because AA+US were under common ownership for all of 2014 and while they were two separate certificated airlines, for all practical purposes they were one, and AA+US flew more passengers in 2014 than WN.  [/size]
 
AA, DL and UA are all made up of a mainline airline plus numerous wholly-owned and contracted third-party regional providers, so if one sticks to the "but AA and US were under two separate certificates in 2014" argument, then AA, DL and UA are always going to be smaller than WN, which doesn't have any wholly-owned or outsourced regional carriers.   
 
What Southwest has accomplished is amazing, but this Investopedia article doesn't do WN justice, as it's written by someone who really doesn't know the history of WN or the workings of the airline industry.