Southwest at Logan: What it means to you

My pal Nicole Wong broke the long-anticipated news this morning that discount king Southwest has decided to begin flying out of Logan, starting this fall.
Southwest, which has been flying out of airports near Manchester, Providence, and Hartford since the late 1990s, has been looking at Boston for quite a while and has made no secret of it. Nicole quotes Gary Kelly, Southwest’s CEO, as saying that the carrier initially will probably begin with eight to 12 daily flights to just a couple of destinations.
OK, this sounds like good news but what will this likely mean to you?
The answer is that, at least at first, it might matter most to business travelers flying to a few specific destinations, according to Rick Seaney, CEO of farecompare.com, which tracks airlines and airfare trends.

A little context is in order here. Amid the global economic malaise, many airlines, including Southwest, looking to cut costs and increase profits have been turning their focus to business customers, both domestically and internationally, because they often need to fly at the last minute and are less concerned about having to pay higher prices to do it.
Southwest, like all carriers, is getting squeezed. Last year, the company, which posted more than 30 straight years of profits, saw its growth rate slow to a two-decade low and has said that it expected to be tapping the brakes on expansion this year.
For years, Southwest’s strategy involved flying into less congested airports near secondary cities (like Providence, Manchester, and Hartford), where fees and taxes are lower and where turnaround times are shorter. But they’re running out of them. So Southwest has been making adjustments. It has said it would look to trim flights on unprofitable routes and shift them to more promising ones. The carrier has also been moving out of its comfort zone a bit and into major cities (like Boston) and last year it also cut agreements with Westjet and Volaris that will allow it to sell service to Canada and Mexico.
Given all this Seaney thinks Southwest will be conservative and keep a tight focus on business travel. And he looks to its schedules at other New England airports for guidance as the carrier tends to favor direct flights into its focus cities as opposed to the traditional hub-and-spoke systems of the legacy carriers.
From Providence and Manchester, Southwest already maintains pretty robust schedules to Baltimore (which is close to D.C.), Chicago, and Philly, so he expects to see service to those destinations early. The carrier might look to head to New York but that market is pretty crowded already.
Beyond that, Seaney thinks Southwest will look to Orlando and perhaps Las Vegas, primarily because as the recession drags on he expects that tourist destinations, which will need to act to boost business, will take steps to increase traffic, including subsidizing service in some cases.
In all cases, Seaney says Southwest’s tendency has been to enter new markets with a “blitzkrieg’’ pricing mentality and later back down to a competitive, standard one-way price point in the $250-$300 range, without huge increases for last-minute fares -- a strategy that will be particularly appealing to business customers.
So there it is. Let the competition begin.