Changing Demographics of the Orange County - San Francisco Route

(MoneyWatch)  The Orange County to San Francisco route has long been a high fare, high service bastion. Both United and American have historically served the route and made a killing doing so. That's all about to change as both Southwest and Virgin America come on the scene.

The fares on this route have been sky high for quite some time. In addition, there wasn't a ton of service. If we look at a random weekday in March, we find 962 to 968 seats per day in the market:

• United
  • 3 CRJ-700s (66 seat aircraft)
  • 1 A320 (138 seat aircraft)
  • 1 737-500 (104-110 seat aircraft)
  • 1 A319 (120 seat aircraft)
  • 1 757-200 (182 seat aircraft)
• American
  • 5 ERJ-140s (44 seat aircraft)

On April 30, Virgin America will ramp up to eventually having 5 A319s a day carrying a total of 610 seats. On May 9, Southwest comes in and if we assume they'll be flying their 137 seat aircraft, then they'll add another 685 seats per day.

That's right. The market will go from 962 seats per day all the way up to 2257 seats per day. That's a 135 percent increase in the number of seats per day in that market. What do you think is going to happen here? Well, fares have to dive to fill all those seats. Of course, the race has already begun with Southwest and Virgin America announcing launch sales. In terms of frequency, United has a slight edge, but it's pretty close. So all these carriers will be actively chasing dollars, and it wouldn't surprise me to see American end up the odd airline out in this race.