Hearing the news today that Southwest will be packing up from Newark this November has had me pretty bummed out. I've been a frequent user of Southwest out of Newark since first moving to the New York area and especially since I've moved to New Jersey last year, having flown on them 12 times over the last several years to or from Newark (and another planned trip later this year). So losing them as an option especially on the EWR-STL route is pretty disappointing to me. United will still serve EWR-STL, but it's mostly on 50 seat regional jets and from my anecdotal experience generally higher priced than Southwest was for comparable flights.

Southwest never took up a large presence, but offered some great deals from New Jersey to the Midwest which fit into my travel options quite well. Even with a smaller presence, Southwest was able to get good numbers on the limited flights they had out of Newark. In 2018, they had regular service to 10 destinations. Only 1 of those routes (EWR-IND) had a load factor below 80% and that route was dropped from the schedule this year. The other 9 routes were all fairly solid performers from a passenger and load factor perspective (see charts below). The STL route has seen solid growth since 2014 increasing in both passengers (up 32.8% to 85,848 in 2018) and load factor (rising from 71.1% to 81.4%). So Southwest has flown more passengers on fuller planes from STL.

Below are charts for the routes from EWR for annual departures, passengers, and load factor. Routes must have had at least 40 departures in a given year to be included.

Aggregated from T-100 data. Some routes did not operate every year. Hover for more info. All numbers are only for flights departing EWR.

Southwest cited that Newark didn't meet financial expectations and has obviously been dealing with the 737 MAX grounding taking a chunk out of there fleet. With the overall numbers on most routes doing well through last year, it would seem that they must not be getting great fares out of Newark which coupled with higher costs of operating out of the airport might have made it a good opportunity for removal from their network. With another airport in the market at LGA (although that's not much of an option for those of in New Jersey), cutting Newark opens up some aircraft without losing an entire market. I haven't looked at fare data, but from my limited experience, the EWR-STL flights were always well priced and often the cheapest out the New York area when I'd compare the same day to American, Delta, and United's nonstops to STL especially in the last 2 years.

One can only hope that at some point when Southwest finally has it's full fleet operating again, they might consider returning. Maybe after Newark completes it's new Terminal 1 project which will replace Terminal A that Southwest had operated out of. I'm not holding my breath though. So for now, I'll just have to enjoy what appears to be my last EWR-STL trip on Southwest in October. Hopefully United will pick up some of the capacity to STL that Southwest is dropping. In 2018, United flew 72k passengers out of EWR to STL compared to Southwest's 85k. So it would seem there is room for either high frequency or (hopefully) bigger planes.

I may try to update this post with some comparison number from LGA at a later date. Update: Check out Part 2 comparing EWR and LGA operations

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