As new cities come on line and new aircraft are delivered, I've been wondering whether Frontier is planning to re-time its flights in DEN to accommodate reasonable connections from the East to the West and visa-versa. Currently, it's very difficult to connect in DEN between many city pairs without an obscenely long wait in one or both directions, sometimes overnight. The question is, would F9 time flights for some sort of a mid-day or even red-eye bank. I'm guessing such a bank would include RONs either on the East or West Coast with a mid-morning and late afternoon bank (6:30am departure from East Coast, 9am arrival in DEN, 11am departure to West coast, 5pm arrival back in DEN, 6pm departure back to East Coast for midnight arrival and RON), or the opposite (6am departure from West Coast, 9:30am arrival in DEN, 10:30am departure to East Coast, 4pm arrival, 5pm departure back to DEN, 8:30pm arrival back in DEN, 9:30pm departure back to West Coast for an 11pm arrival back on the West Coast for a RON). A similar sort of bank with red-eyes or late flights heading East (depending on distance from DEN: CID would be a RON while LGA would be a red-eye) could also be possible. It seems like they are missing out on a ton of connection opportunities with the current schedule, but I'm also not sure if they have the a/c to have such a large bank and support the rest of their operation. Any opinions on this?

ULCCs don't bank flights, but with the fewer gates they now have it isn't even really an option now.

enilria wrote:

ULCCs don't bank flights, but with the fewer gates they now have it isn't even really an option now.

Unless I've missed it, Frontier haven't messaged an intention to move away from being a point to point ULCC. No focus on connections means no need to bank flights.

Frontier's connections that exist now in DEN, for the most part, have long connection times between times, 4-5 hours +. I would assume this is ti minimize the chances of a missed connection and F9 having to foot the bill for the pax. Was on a F9 flight yesterday from STL-DEN and the passenger sitting next me was going on to LAX. He said he had a 4.5 hour layover in DEN, but it saved him nearly $200 r/t.

Frontier 14

MIflyer12 wrote:

winginit wrote:

enilria wrote:

ULCCs don't bank flights, but with the fewer gates they now have it isn't even really an option now.

Unless I've missed it, Frontier haven't messaged an intention to move away from being a point to point ULCC. No focus on connections means no need to bank flights.

Maybe you did miss it. Emphasis mine.


“Customers will benefit not only from the broad new selection of nonstop routes, but our growing network will provide more than 1,000 new connecting route options,” Biffle continued. “By taking advantage of our natural share of connecting passengers, we can offer our low fares to even more of America. This is particularly important through our largest hub and our home in Denver.”



https://www.flyfrontier.com/news/posts/ ... opulation/

There was also a lengthy thread here quoting UA's CEO that said (I paraphrase) that running a connecting hub was a battle F9 couldn't win.

Fair play - I did indeed miss it.

winginit wrote:

enilria wrote:

ULCCs don't bank flights, but with the fewer gates they now have it isn't even really an option now.

Unless I've missed it, Frontier haven't messaged an intention to move away from being a point to point ULCC. No focus on connections means no need to bank flights.

Maybe you did miss it. Emphasis mine.


“Customers will benefit not only from the broad new selection of nonstop routes, but our growing network will provide more than 1,000 new connecting route options,” Biffle continued. “By taking advantage of our natural share of connecting passengers, we can offer our low fares to even more of America. This is particularly important through our largest hub and our home in Denver.”



https://www.flyfrontier.com/news/posts/ ... opulation/

There was also a lengthy thread here quoting UA's CEO that said (I paraphrase) that running a connecting hub was a battle F9 couldn't win.

Frontier14 wrote:

Frontier's connections that exist now in DEN, for the most part, have long connection times between times, 4-5 hours +. I would assume this is ti minimize the chances of a missed connection and F9 having to foot the bill for the pax. Was on a F9 flight yesterday from STL-DEN and the passenger sitting next me was going on to LAX. He said he had a 4.5 hour layover in DEN, but it saved him nearly $200 r/t.

Frontier 14

Yep that'll minimize the risk of a misconnect, especially when few F9 routes nowadays feature more than 1 daily R/T.

The other low risk (in this case it's really only the checked bags that you need to worry about) is thru flights East-DEN-West.

I know F9 are gradually adding these on non-DEN routes, but are there any DEN thrus where the east and west destinations are the same in both directions, thereby being true 1-stops like WN has been doing forever?

MIflyer12 wrote:

winginit wrote:

enilria wrote:

ULCCs don't bank flights, but with the fewer gates they now have it isn't even really an option now.

Unless I've missed it, Frontier haven't messaged an intention to move away from being a point to point ULCC. No focus on connections means no need to bank flights.

Maybe you did miss it. Emphasis mine.


“Customers will benefit not only from the broad new selection of nonstop routes, but our growing network will provide more than 1,000 new connecting route options,” Biffle continued. “By taking advantage of our natural share of connecting passengers, we can offer our low fares to even more of America. This is particularly important through our largest hub and our home in Denver.”



https://www.flyfrontier.com/news/posts/ ... opulation/

There was also a lengthy thread here quoting UA's CEO that said (I paraphrase) that running a connecting hub was a battle F9 couldn't win.

I thought I remembered something like this with the announcement, thank you for finding it. I wonder how they will work this. Obviously, people flying Frontier will be more tolerant of longer sits in exchange for low fares, but overnight or all day (ie 10+ hour) layovers will likely turn at least a few people away. As has been mentioned here, they also have fewer gates than before, might not have enough a/c (at least initially) to offer decent (5ish hour or less) connections to all of their DEN markets, and the only 1X per day (or less) frequency they offer to many smaller cities will make things even harder.

MIflyer12 wrote:

Maybe you did miss it. Emphasis mine.


“Customers will benefit not only from the broad new selection of nonstop routes, but our growing network will provide more than 1,000 new connecting route options,” Biffle continued. “By taking advantage of our natural share of connecting passengers, we can offer our low fares to even more of America. This is particularly important through our largest hub and our home in Denver.”



https://www.flyfrontier.com/news/posts/ ... opulation/

There was also a lengthy thread here quoting UA's CEO that said (I paraphrase) that running a connecting hub was a battle F9 couldn't win.

In the twenty years I've followed Frontier, fairly closely, I've never thought of it as a point to point carrier. It was a hub and spoke airline when I first found it in 1997 (my first flight was BOS-DEN-LAX) and to a large extent stayed that way. Sure, there were some point to point routes, some of the Mexican routes, eg, or the resorts, but not like it is described on A.net.

Just out of interest, I checked some western cities (west of DEN) for this week-end and found DEN-PDX at 3 x daily and DEN-SEA, DEN-LAX and DEN-SFO at 2 x daily. I began to feel as if A.netters are talking about a different airline, so I didn't bother to check anymore.

mariner

Just out of interest, I checked some western cities (west of DEN) for this week-end and found DEN-PDX at 3 x daily...

That will drop to one a day soon.

This is for Mariner. With Frontier seemingly bringing back most of the cities they served from Denver before they took the ULCC route the only two cities they have left out are SBN and BMI. Now I do not know what their yields were out of each city however they grossed 4-5 million dollars or more out of each city and flew over 21,000 passengers in and out of each city on their 3 times a week service on their Airbus A319 jets. Seems that's a large sum of money to leave on the table and they could easily make seasonal service work from both cities. They didn't even use all the subsidy money out of SBN because the rest was used to start United's successful EWR flights.