Customer service at airlines is becoming a lost art - especially at the bigger/older airports and I think people are certainly reacting to it - especially the nickel and diming bag fees.
Thanks to the locations where I and my immediate family live I fly into/out of smaller regional airports and the difference in service levels and amenities is amazing.
At my parents' home airport they have local restaurants as the airport concession service and a special seating area w/ $$ leather couches and recliners a local furniture company has set up to get their name/product out there!
...go to Pensacola in the present day. What you have is a very nice regional airport that does about three times the passenger volume of PCB
Actually, they do more than 5 times the volume!
Their big goal right now is getting one of the coveted daily non-stop slots into Reagan/Washinton National. (Which would actually be a pretty big coup because of how tightly those slots are capped)
Last year during Christmas, ASA ran flights from VPS to NYC using 50 seat jets that would have normally been sitting on the ground somewhere due to the holiday schedule. I did some digging and found that those flights did pretty well but, in the grand scheme of things, did not pose the best usage for the aircraft. It is not being done again this year so my guess is that the yield that they were getting from the flights didn't warrant doing it again.
Regarding DCA...all of the passenger info gets analyzed to the "n'th" degree. If traffic warranted it, again, it would be looked at; however, no airline is going to pull a 150+ seat aircraft off of a route that is routinely full to service a small city with a 50 seat aircraft instead. It's simple math...
...and I'll say it again...
The new airport is being designed around the Airbus A320 model. It will be able to poetentially handle something as large as a 757, albeit, with very little fuel onboard due to the ramp and runway weight limitations so you will never get a true international flight from the new airport, anyway...
All I really care about is Delta or AirTran flying a real jet to/from ATL. I guess the French and Germans could change planes in ATL.
My last flight from VPS to Atlanta was on a prop plane - the airbus is a long ways off! :rofl: