With Southwest combining New York operations to LaGuardia, I wanted to do a little more comparison of their operations at both LGA and EWR. Last week I posted some initial numbers and thoughts about recent operations of outbound flights for Southwest at EWR. The basic outcome from that post was that looking at last year, Southwest had good numbers on their outbound routes, hitting over 80% load factors on 9 of 10 routes.

Looking at the most recent year (2018), Newark served 10 destinations while LaGuardia served 12. But only four destinations were served from both airports (STL, MDW, FLL, DEN). Looking at those 4 destinations STL, MDW, and DEN all had better load factors at LGA and for FLL the service from LGA was only seasonal so it's not a great comparison. See below for more info about individual route comparison.

	Newark			LaGuardia
DEST	PASSENGERS	DEPARTURES	LOAD FACTOR	PASSENGERS	DEPARTURES	LOAD FACTOR
DEN	96,602	662	85.4	112,657	808	90.3
FLL	81,059	611	86.5	11,698	98	79.8
MDW	211,340	1,816	80.4	260,591	2,013	89.7
STL	85,848	678	81.4	125,292	1,002	83.0

Passengers flying out of New York Airports in 2018.

When looking at overall operations, LGA already had more departures and served more passengers than EWR. In 2018, Southwest flew 1.369M passengers out of LGA on 10,822 regular flights compared to 787k passengers out on EWR on 6,202 regular flights (explore more on Southwest routes [limited set]). It remains to be seen how many additional flights or destinations that Southwest can or wants to transfer from EWR to LGA.

The two major reasons for closing Newark operations common cited were the squeeze on their fleet stemming from the 737 MAX groundings and that they weren't able to meet financial goals at EWR. I don't know exactly what the internal goals were for Southwest when they entered the market, but we can look at what the average fare prices were on flights from EWR.

Taking a basic look at some recent fare data for EWR and LGA routes, LGA doesn't walk away as a clear cut winner. I'm only looking at the fares from the fourth quarter of 2018 on the nonstop routes, so not accounting for the fares of connecting travelers and only comparing a small time window. For the 4 overlapping routes between EWR and LGA, Newark has higher fares for every route (see table below). Taking STL as an example destination, direct fare average at LGA was $223.51 and at EWR was $227.89. Load Factor at LGA was slightly higher (83.0% to 81.4%) and there were three departures per day (150k annual available seats) from LaGuardia compared to two at Newark (105k annual available seats). Below we have more on the average direct fares for all 2018 Q4 routes form both airports:

Southwest Destinations from Newark
	Average	Nonstop	Cents	Est Direct
Dsestinaion	Fare ($)	Miles	per Mile	Passengers Q4
AUS	218.16	1,504	14.5	5,500
DEN	237.93	1,605	14.8	4,140
FLL	146.06	1,065	13.7	4,630
IND	156.43	645	24.3	2,820
MCO	153.20	937	16.4	3,920
MDW	198.24	711	27.9	6,340
OAK	226.54	2,555	8.9	1,880
PHX	249.05	2,133	11.7	3,280
SAN	225.10	2,425	9.3	3,050
STL	227.88	872	26.1	4,600

Southwest Destinations from LaGuardia
	Average	Nonstop	Cents	Est Direct
Dsestinaion	Fare ($)	Miles	per Mile	Passengers Q4
ATL	178.40	762	23.4	7,010
BNA	204.61	764	26.8	5,910
DAL	212.98	1,381	15.4	8,650
DEN	218.29	1,620	13.5	6,990
FLL	144.91	1,076	13.5	1,060
HOU	236.25	1,428	16.5	6,960
MCI	214.60	1,107	19.4	3,860
MDW	168.69	725	23.3	8,480
MKE	191.94	738	26.0	3,340
MSY	191.73	1,183	16.2	2,950
STL	223.51	888	25.2	5,750
TPA	179.51	1,010	17.8	4,840

Data is for customers flying on Southwest directly from New York airport to the destination in the Fourth Quarter of 2018. Does not include any passengers using these routes for connecting flights. Data uses DB1B Market Data.

When comparing the LaGuardia destinations to Newark's, Newark has been serving longer routes, including several all the way to the West Coast. Newark served 5 routes over 1,500 miles including 3 over 2,000 miles (OAK, PHX, SAN). LaGuardia is prohibited from serving routes over 1,500 miles except for Denver (and Saturday only routes). So while operations at New York are consolidating (and hopefully total capacity increases at LGA for Southwest), it's a guarantee that these longer routes will not continue and New York travelers will now always have to transfer to reach the West Coast on Southwest. Those longer routes may have hampered Newark's profitably because generated much less in dollars per mile (average nonstop fare divided by nonstop distance) than shorter routes. The three routes over 2,000 miles each generated less than 12 cents per mile from a passenger fare, while shorter routes like STL and MDW generated 26 and 28 cents per mile in the fourth quarter of 2018.

With these longer routes, Southwest was flying more 737-800's and MAX8's out of Newark than LGA in 2018. While the MAX8's were still being established in the fleet in 2018, 737-800 variants were flown on 82.6% of departures to Denver (with another 4.2% on MAX8's), 77.7% of departures to Phoenix (4.0% MAX8's), and 58.3% of departures to San Diego (5.3% MAX8's) with the rest of the flights taking place on smaller 700 variants. Overall, 36.4% of departures out of EWR were on an 800 or MAX8 in 2018. Compare that with LGA where only 16.4% of it's total departures were on an 800 or MAX8 with Denver again being the most popular route for the 800, but at only 34.3% (and 1.4% on MAX8).

So Newark appears to compete well on load factors (but slightly behind) and has comparable fares with LGA, but didn't appear to be getting great additional revenue out of their longer flights from Newark and the larger planes preferred for those routes have been in short supply for Southwest with the MAX8 grounding. It'll be interesting to see what changes if any are made to operations at LGA to make up for some of the flights lost at Newark, but several of the routes can not be replaced at LGA because they extend beyond the distance limits put on the airport. Newark flew 36.5% of passengers out of the New York market for Southwest in 2018 and it'd be surprising if they don't try to capture some of those passengers with additional flights out of LGA. After looking at the comparison between both airports, I'm a little more upbeat that Southwest would consider returning to the airport someday when their fleet grows again, but that's without knowing what their costs at Newark were.

Below are a few more graphs with additional data on LGA and EWR's Annual Load Factors, Passengers, and Departure totals for 2014-2018: Data for passengers flying out of New York airports. All values are annual totals

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