Southwest Airlines is heading into its fourth year in Hawaii with the opening of a command center on Oahu, part of a nearly $40 million brick-and-mortar investment to support operations across the isles since it started flying here in March 2019.
The new command center is significant to Southwest’s Hawaii operations as it is one of just 18 in all of the destinations Southwest serves, said Southwest Chief Operating Officer Andrew Watterson during a visit Tuesday at Daniel K. Inouye International Airport.
Watterson said Southwest generally reserves command centers for its largest stations such as Las Vegas or Oakland, Calif.; however, Hawaii’s multi-island network required greater coordination since activity takes place at five airports across the state.
“Honolulu is a medium-sized airport, but it serves as an anchor for the other four island airports and Hawaii operations to the mainland,” Watterson said.
Brian Little, Southwest’s Honolulu command center manager, said the new facility is where employees decide on gate changes and flight holds as well as work closely with network operations to minimize the impact that delays, cancellations, aircraft swaps and air traffic control issues have on local operations. The center also implements recovery plans in response to irregularities and ensures communications are flowing between the mainland and Hawaii, Little said.
Watterson said the opening of the Oahu command center demonstrates the airline’s dedication to Hawaii as well as its fourth-year focus on continuing to make improvements to the Southwest experience for employees and travelers.
“If we were going to leave, the pandemic was a great opportunity. We stayed,” Watterson said. “This is us kind of reinforcing (Hawaii) and treating it as an operation that is intended for the long run. This is what you do when you have an operation that is kind of a big scale and you want to perform at high level over a period of time: You spend the money to invest in that structure to support the operations over the long haul.”
David Sellers, Southwest’s senior adviser in airport affairs, said the state initially provided Southwest with a holding room for passengers waiting to board flights, but the airline was responsible for building all of the other supports for its operations at the end of G Concourse, such as back office and break spaces, areas for mechanics, a provisioning warehouse and a training facility.
Southwest’s latest investments are augmenting prior strides such as moving into preferential gates that are more convenient for Hawaii customers, improving its luggage system and increasing access to kiosks and other infrastructure needs.
“When we moved from the area on the G gates to E gates, we discovered we needed some supports. We started out small with the break area and then expanded to the command center,” Sellers said. “For our latest investment, we discovered that we needed a little bit more space for provisioning supplies, ground support, equipment, mechanics and a whole little sundry of things, so we leased a warehouse over on the Ewa side of the airport and we are investing about $1.5 million.”
Sellers said Southwest also has made investments in its operations at the neighbor island airports and has a few other “little things to do to make the gate areas ‘more Southwest,’ but I think the vast majority of the large investments are done.”
Sellers pegs Southwest’s brick-and-mortar investment to date in Hawaii at $35 million to $40 million, “because it seems like every day we add a little bit more.”
Southwest also has strengthened its workforce both from a hiring and a resource side. During his visit to Honolulu, Watterson chatted with airport workers in their new break room, which moved about a year and a half ago from the G gates to the E gates, significantly cutting down the employee commute to use the room.
Sellers said, “It’s pretty foundational of Southwest culture: We take care of our people. In addition to customers, that’s probably one of the single most important focuses.”
Watterson added, “We get our low cost from our assets and our people being more productive, and so you have to give the people the correct facilities and tools if you want them to thrive.”
Little said the carrier also has scaled up employment by 15% across all its Oahu departments to support the command center.
Regiane Santos, Southwest’s regional manager for Hawaii ground operations, said the airline in Hawaii already has grown to 722 employees this year. That’s up about 36% from 2022, and it is still hiring.
“We’re easily looking to hire another 50 people,” Santos said. “We have a lot of folks going through the background process as well.”
Southwest spent its first three years here growing and adjusting its trans- Pacific and interisland service. As the carrier heads into its fourth year, its Hawaii schedule is mostly built out with the exception of some seasonal changes.
Southwest’s long-running $39 interisland fare sale on every seat for every nonstop interisland flight in Hawaii, which began in July to help the carrier better absorb 2022’s 60% interisland capacity boost, ended Dec. 31.
However, there are still plenty of $39 interisland fares in the market for spring, although not on every seat or every route. Watterson said that going forward, Hawaii’s interisland fares will be based more on the marketplace, but added that “we pride ourselves on low fares.”
“We wanted people to try us, and we saw a really great trial,” he said. “We had a disruption in December, so it took a little capital out of the customer bank if you will, but our customer satisfaction scores and bookings for March look solid nationwide and in Hawaii.”
During a fourth-quarter investor earnings call Jan. 26, Watterson talked in greater detail about the December weather and the operational disruption that lead Southwest to cancel more than 16,700 flights between Dec. 21 and 31.
“Southwest experienced a historic event with a combination of challenges we hadn’t experienced before. What began as a weather event on Dec. 21 turned into a crew scheduling event by Dec. 24,” he said during the earnings call.
Tuesday at the Honolulu airport, Watterson said, “We made sure that we protected both our international and our Hawaii operation. We kind of kept them running separately so they were much less impacted.”
Watterson said Southwest recognized there was an essential air service element to Hawaii and international service since geography prevents passengers from being able to drive to another destination.
Santos said another concern was the availability of hotel rooms, which were limited in Hawaii.
“We didn’t want to put people in a bad spot,” Watterson said.
Southwest experienced plenty of headwinds itself after entering the Hawaii market on March 17, 2019. Just days before its Hawaii launch, its initial plan hit some turbulence with the grounding of Boeing 737 MAX aircraft following fatal crashes involving Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines.
Southwest’s Hawaii expansion was interrupted again by the pandemic, which saw travel demand plunge because of fear of COVID-19 and government containment measures. Travel demand finally began returning in 2021.
The 175-seat, more fuel- efficient Boeing 737 MAX 8 aircraft was approved to start flying passengers in late 2020, and Southwest has been flying it in Hawaii.
Watterson said the next step will be to begin flying the MAX 7 aircraft, which at 150 seats is a better-size plane for interisland service.
“We are waiting for the MAX 7 to be certified by the FAA. The 175 seats we have in our MAX-8 are probably a little bit too big, so when we get the MAX 7 certified, we’ll be using that interisland as well as to the mainland. Our business case for the neighbor island network always included MAX 7s. I anticipate spring or summer of 2024 is when they will be in revenue service.”
Watterson said the flying range of the MAX 7 aircraft also would allow Southwest to potentially service longer- distance routes. Some aviation experts have said that with the MAX 7, Southwest could offer direct service to Hawaii from as far away as Denver.
