For years, state leaders and business executives in Rhode Island have called on airlines to offer nonstop service from PVD to new destinations, particularly on the West Coast. But as of September 2020, no airline has introduced nonstop routes to the West Coast, and while Frontier and Sun Country launched routes to Denver and Las Vegas, respectively, they were short-lived and were cancelled shortly after launch. In fact, of the twenty-seven new routes that were launched from T.F. Green in the past four years, all but eight have been cut.
So why have so many of these routes failed? My theory is that most of these new routes were launched on (ultra) low-cost carriers like Frontier, Allegiant, and Sun Country that offered service so infrequently (for example twice weekly service) that it didn't make sense for many travelers. Additionally, these airlines were unknown to many Rhode Island and New England travelers at launch, which may have made it harder for these routes to succeed (I can speak from experience that trying to convince my mother to fly Frontier to Tampa was a no-go when Southwest also offered nonstop service). Of course, these issues aren't the ULCC's (Ultra Low Cost Carrier) faults -- their business model is particularly difficult in areas where they suffer low name recognition like the Northeast.
So today, I'm going to try to find out which markets could actually yield successful nonstop routes out of PVD, particularly for one of the major airlines (American, Delta, United, JetBlue, and Southwest); I'm focusing on these five because the LCCs have struggled with new routes out of PVD over the past few years. But first, a quick note on methodology -- I'm using outbound traffic data from Q3 2019 that is published by the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, specifically the Airline Origin and Destination Survey (DB1B). DB1B data is a random sampling of 10% of all itineraries, so if a visualization below shows 1,200 travelers on a given route, for example, in reality there are 12,000 during the quarter. I used MySQL to process and analyze the data and then created visualizations using Tableau (and its wonderful student license!). Also, this is a pre-COVID 19 analysis -- that's a topic for a future post.
First, let's look at any route served from PVD with more than 1,000 departing travelers each month. Note that the market data below refers to final destinations -- for example, if you're flying from Providence to St. Louis but have a layover in Baltimore, your destination in the data below is considered STL, not BWI.
As expected, PVD's most heavily traveled routes are primarily to Florida, the Washington, D.C. metro area, and Chicago, all of which are served nonstop from PVD. Now, let's remove any non-stop route currently offered from PVD from the map, as seen below (note passenger numbers have been re-scaled in order to account for connecting routes only).
The map above shows that the most popular route from PVD that requires a layover is BNA (Nashville), with approximately 4,000 monthly travelers (remember, the visualization shows 10% quarterly numbers, so you can multiply the map data by 3 for an approximate estimation of monthly departures). Similarly, DEN (Denver) has about 3,600 monthly departures from PVD during the third quarter of 2019. For reference, these routes have almost as many passengers as United and Americans' nonstops to ORD (Chicago-O'Hare) during Q3 2019, which is a lot!
Importantly, at the time, these destinations actually had nonstop service from PVD (BNA by Sun Country, DEN by Frontier). In a similar positions is RDU (Raleigh-Durham), which had nonstop service during Q319 and similarly high traffic but was also later cancelled by Frontier. Yet while demand seems high for these routes based on the data, they were ultimately cancelled -- exploring the reasons behind these and other route cancellations will be the subject of a future post.
Moving on to routes that were not nonstop at the time, there are two main categories of high-traffic destinations from PVD:
- Markets on the West Coast, including LAX (Los Angeles), SAN (San Diego), SFO (San Francisco), and SEA (Seattle). Notably, demand is likely actually higher from PVD in these markets due to reliever airports like SJC (San Jose) and nonstop routes out of Boston. However, serving these cities is difficult due to range and efficiency constraints on the relatively low capacity aircraft that would probably be needed to make these routes profitable. This, too, will be the subject of another article that's in the works about West Coast routes from PVD (hint: it involves the A220).
- Markets in the eastern half of the country that can be served by low-capacity, lower-range regional aircraft like the E175/190 including markets in Texas, the upper Midwest, and the South. Because these markets can be served by smaller aircraft and thus usually require fewer travelers to reach profitability, these will be the subject of today's post.
The top five routes from PVD to markets in the eastern half of the U.S. are shown in the table below. Also displayed is nonstop monthly departures to these markets from BOS (Boston), which shares much of PVD's catchment area. However, given PVD's central location (4.5 million people live within an hour driving distance from T.F. Green) and its comparative ease of use as an airport compared to BOS, nonstop routes from PVD on the big carriers (i.e. American, Delta, United, Southwest, and JetBlue) could compete well with BOS routes by attracting business and leisure travelers wary of the traffic and crowds of BOS.
| Destination Market | PVD Monthly Departures | BOS Nonstop Monthly Departures |
| Dallas (DFW/DAL) | 2,400 (combined) | 28,680 |
| Norfolk (ORF) | 1,800 | 1,404 |
| Austin (AUS) | 1,600 | 10,542 |
| Jacksonville (JAX) | 1,500 | 9,525 |
| St. Louis (STL) | 1,500 | 6,888 |
Then, in order to gauge whether any of these routes might make sense for any of the five non-ULCC airlines mentioned above, the figures below show the nonstop market share from BOS for each of these routes by airline.
Briefly analyzing each route yields the following conclusions (note I'm only discussing American, Delta, JetBlue, Southwest, and United, and for each route I consider any airline that flies nonstop from Boston and/or any mainline carrier with a hub in the destination market).
- PVD-DFW/DAL: This is a huge market out of Boston! American and JetBlue have about 75% of the Boston departing market, so neither is likely interested in starting a PVD-DFW route -- Boston is one of JetBlue's primary hubs, and American already has a ton of capacity between Boston and Dallas. American would probably only launch this route if PVD travelers showed a huge demand for connecting traffic from DFW, which isn't likely. More interesting here is Southwest, which carries only about 10% of Dallas-bound traffic from BOS. Thus, it might be interesting for them to try a nonstop PVD-DAL route to compete with American and JetBlue in Boston, especially given that regional demand for the route is so high. Plus, DAL is a pretty big focus city for Southwest, so it could be useful for connecting traffic in the West and Southwest. My rating: 5/5 (strong route)
- PVD-ORF: While there's surprisingly significant travel between PVD and ORF, possibly due to naval contractors traveling back and forth between Newport and Norfolk (this is just speculation, of course), Delta has a very small amount of nonstop seats to Norfolk even from Boston, so I can't imagine this would be a profitable route out of Providence given the already pretty limited market size we see in the data. My rating: 1/5 (very weak route)
- PVD-AUS: While JetBlue is unlikely to launch this route because of its Boston hub, it could be an interesting route for Southwest. Like PVD-DAL, Southwest has a relatively small market share of PVD-AUS traffic from BOS (a bit over a quarter), so it could make sense for them to launch a PVD-AUS route to try to attract some passengers away from Boston. However, the route traffic from PVD isn't nearly as high as it is from Dallas, so it might be harder to make this route profitable; however, AUS also offers significant connection opportunities that could make up for this. My rating: 3/5 (potentially strong route)
- PVD-JAX: Numbers-wise, this is fairly similar to the Austin route. Like before, neither JetBlue nor Delta would launch this route since Boston serves as a hub. Southwest, which does not currently offer nonstop service between BOS and JAX, could be a contender, but the combination of pretty strong competition from JetBlue and Delta operating out of their hubs in Boston, relatively low regional demand, and Southwest's already extensive Florida destination list from PVD makes this market pairing unlikely to fly (pun intended). My rating: 2/5 (weak route)
- PVD-STL: JetBlue doesn't currently serve St. Louis, and I can't imagine they'd start just to create a PVD-STL route. And as neither airport is a hub for the mainline carriers, that leaves only Southwest -- which coincidentally offers the only current nonstop service from Boston. So with relatively low demand out of both PVD and BOS, Southwest seems unlikely to compete with its monopoly on nonstop service to STL from BOS. However, Southwest did operate PVD-STL as a pop-up nonstop route this summer, so maybe there's more demand than I think! My rating: 2/5 (weak route).
So the summary from this analysis seems to be that while PVD-DAL could very well be an attractive route, there aren't any other obvious "hidden gem" markets airlines haven't tried yet. But what about the new routes airlines have already tried and cancelled... did they fail because of unsustainable economics, or something else? And what about the West Coast? These two questions will be the subject of my next few posts, so stay tuned!
If you've made it this far, thanks so much for reading. Please leave a comment or get in touch if you have thoughts or comments on my work!
JN