Dan, be honest, who do you think brings you your feed to OAK and LAX?
This is my understanding of it. The fact is we don't get that much feed from anyone in those cities. Look at our departure times, they are pretty early, hence it's hard to get a lot of people connecting to an early am departure. LAX has later flights and we do code share with some, I believe American Eagle feeds us there. We do codeshare with The Virgin airlines, Atlantic, Australia and America, in Asia we have a strong Korean Air feed and ANA also. Quite a few other foreign carriers too. We also have a codeshare agreement in JFK with JetBlue and APA just approved codeshare for American with Hawaiian and Alaska.
Our business plan is more point to point than most. We primarily sell tickets to people in our originating cities that want to go to Hawaii, period.
Interesting couple stories on the subject. When we first started PHX we codeshared with USAir. The PHX station manager told me back than that Hawaiian knew it was a matter of time before USAir would start their own flights to Hawaii and we changed our business plan to start weaning our flights of the USAir codeshare. He said by the time USAir started their own flights we had gone from 80% of our passengers being feed from USAir to less than 20%. Our load factors were the same and yield had not taken a hit, but we just stopped depending on that feed. Before you ask, I don't have clue how they changed like that, but obviously they do. I believe it was partly do to changing departure and arrival times.
We use to codeshare with Alaska, not sure how much they fed us, but obviously we don't any more. It didn't effect our loads.
When ATA went under, SWA approached us about a codeshare. I know they talked (I've heard Gary Kelly and Mark Dunkerley are friends) but when asked, Dunkerley said it was just two completely different types of operations that simply couldn't be made to match up.
Again, and I've seen an investor presentation that says this, Hawaiian's business plan is to simply fly into cities that are large enough to support enough traffic locally that want to buy a ticket to Hawaii. The Hawaiian name and image is a powerful marketing tool. The only other airline that could compete in that area was of course, Aloha. No mainland carrier has that option. A good example of that at work is SNA to Hawaii. Aloha killed it in that market, it was their strongest mainland market and grew to multiple daily flights. CO jumped in and didn't do well at all, they dropped it.