American Exits the Orange County - San Francisco Market

(MoneyWatch)  Back in January, I end my post about the onslaught of competition in the Orange County to San Francisco market with the following:

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.

It appears I was right. American will be pulling out of the route in November along with San Jose to Orange County as well. This really isn't much of a surprise. So let's look at that random weekday in March that we used before and compare it to a random weekday in December to see how things are changing.

American's 5 flights drop to nothing. That's a loss of 220 seats in the market.

United still has 7 flights in the market, but there are smaller airplanes on the route. There's a net loss of about 100 seats a day.

Virgin America has cut back from 5 to 4 flights, but they've upgauged from using A319s to using A320s. So it's a net loss of only 14 seats.

Southwest is the only one growing. They have gone from 5 to 6 flights a day meaning that they have 137 more seats in the market. So as you can see, the total number of seats has declined by about 200. That's about a 9 percent decrease. But the number of flights has dropped more than 20 percent from 22 to 17.

It shouldn't be any surprise to see this happening, but it is interesting to watch.