Why are commuter flights so expensive?

"Colin W Kingsbury" wrote
I agree, but the problem is that Southwest cannot serve the whole country
and sustain its business model.

Then maybe the portions of the country that can't be served by that
busiess model have to pay a lot more. Or maybe the hub-and-spoke
model is outdated. In fact, maybe it was never a good model in the
first place, and was only used because certain costs (airport/highway
expansion, air traffic control) could be externalized. Maybe the
future is in large numbers of smaller airplanes (737 and down) flying
point-to-point routes.

Like I said, when you do it constantly, it really adds up.

It sure does. I used to travel on business regularly, and I hated
Southwest. Just realize that the business traveller of old is an
endangered species, which is making the old style airlines hurt.

With times being tough the past few years, companies were free to force
their traveling employees to eat a lot of s--t and fly only the cheapest
available fares.

Yup.

As conditions improve this will change. Good employees will
demand better accomodations or they will quit.

You're kidding yourself. This is the economy we can look forward to
for years. Think jobless recovery.

This is why I think Airtran
has been very smart to offer Business Class seating at reasonable prices.

I doubt it. I think the Southwest model is the future - one class.
One might even say no class.

IMHO we need to weed the 6 majors (UA, US, AA, DL, NW, CO) down to three or
four

Which will happen, I can assure you.

probably by allowing some of the mergers that would have been
unthinkable previously.

And what good will that do? The fundamental problem isn't too many
players - it's too much capacity. The business traveler isn't coming
back. He's doing his job by remote control, usually via phone and
internet - and usually from Bangalore.

Michael