Markets

AirTran Continues to Diversify Beyond Atlanta

By Brett Snyder

Updated on: March 11, 2009 / 11:16 AM EDT / MoneyWatch

AirTran was a presentor at the recent Raymond James Institutional Investors Conference, and thanks to government rules, that presentation has been posted for all of us to review. AirTran gives a detailed overview of its network, and it's amazing to see how far Atlanta has fallen in terms of importance to the airline over the last few years. Here's the chart that caught my eye:

This chart looks at capacity in each of the four market segments in which AirTran currently plays. (I didn't even realize they could break it down into four segments.) As you can see, some of these have overlap. In 2000, 92 percent of capacity touched Atlanta, but 29 percent touched Florida? Huh? Well, apparently a big chunk of that capacity went between Atlanta and Florida so it fell in both buckets.

Now we see that Atlanta has dropped from 92 percent all the way down to 60 percent. This is still a very hefty number, but it's encouraging to see more diversification. You never want all your eggs in one basket in this industry (right, Frontier?). The Florida percentage has stayed relatively consistent, but I would imagine that the nature of that capacity has shifted. More Florida flights are going to the upper Midwest and Northeast instead of to Atlanta these days.

And the Baltimore and Milwaukee hublets are growing as well as they look for opportunities to grow in the shadow of the current Delta/Northwest combo at the latter. This doesn't account for 100 percent of their flights. For instance, I can fly from LA to Indianapolis this summer, but it does account for most of the airline's service.

As AirTran notes later in the presentation, "Legacy Hub Redudancies Likely to Create Opportunities." We'll see how much Atlanta constitutes as a percent of total five years from now.