Southwest Airlines does a switcheroo on Hawaii's Big Island

Southwest Airlines is making an interesting change to service on Hawaii's Big Island.

The Dallas-based carrier recently filed plans to slash service from Ellison Onizuka Kona International Airport at Keahole (KOA) to San Francisco Bay Oakland International Airport (OAK), as first seen in Cirium schedules and later confirmed by a carrier spokesperson.

The airline's Kona-to-Oakland route will end March 5, 2025. It was first added back in January 2020 as part of one of Southwest's initial tranches of Hawaii routes. (The airline's Hawaii service started in March 2019.)

While the airline is cutting service to Oakland, the airline is adding service from Sacramento International Airport (SMF) to KOA on March 6, 2025. Southwest last flew from Sacramento to Kona in the summer of 2022, when it operated a once-weekly service.

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The airline didn't have much to share about this switcheroo, explaining in a milquetoast statement that "we're meeting Customer demand and maturing our Hawaii service as we surpass five years of proudly serving the Hawaiian Islands with interisland and Mainland connectivity."

For Southwest's network, this is an interesting change. Though the airline doesn't operate hubs in the traditional sense, it does have a slew of operating bases nationwide that act similarly to hubs for the major network carriers.

One of those big bases is Oakland, from where Southwest flies to more than 30 destinations. While Sacramento isn't as sizable an operating base as Oakland, the airline does operate flights from Sacramento to 28 destinations, according to Cirium data, so there still will be quite a few connecting itineraries available to travelers with this switch.

Seemingly, Southwest didn't see enough nonstop demand to warrant serving Oakland to Kona, and that route will now become unserved unless another carrier steps in to fill Southwest's gap. Note that Southwest will maintain daily service between Oakland and Honolulu, Maui and Lihue on Kauai.

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Department of Transportation data shows that Southwest saw an average of about 60 daily nonstop passengers on flights between Oakland and Kona in 2023.

In other Hawaii network news, Southwest will start red-eye flights from the Aloha State in the first quarter of next year. Also, earlier this year, Southwest canceled its route from Los Angeles to Maui.

The airline is mulling further tweaks to its Hawaii network — especially its interisland flying, which hasn't performed up to its initial targets — as well. Asked recently about the load factors on interisland flights, Andrew Watterson, Southwest's chief operating officer, told The Airline Observer that "I think they're low."

Speaking on the company's recent third-quarter earnings call, Watterson said, "We have cross-functional teams that are organized to focus and drive this [change in our Hawaii network], and we're seeing the results of those efforts, and those continue and will continue until we reach our business case."

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