Summary
- Southwest Airlines has prolonged its flight schedule through April 2024, allowing customers to book their spring break flights prematurely.
- The airline is adding recent international routes from Baltimore, including flights to Belize and several other destinations within the Caribbean and Mexico.
- Southwest can also be expanding domestically, with additional flights from Baltimore and St. Louis to popular Florida destinations.
Southwest Airlines has prolonged its schedule through April 2024 and added several recent routes, including international ones. Many of the expansion is concentrated around St. Louis, Baltimore, and Austin.
Increasing spring operations
Southwest Airlines is already preparing for next 12 months’s spring break and has prolonged its schedule through April 8, 2024. In today’s announcement, the airline announced recent international routes from three cities. As well as, the airline is bringing back several routes in high demand.
From Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport, Southwest is launching a weekly flight to Belize, departing on Saturdays. The brand new route will launch on March 9, the identical day Southwest will relaunch just a few international routes from Baltimore. Also, on Saturdays, Southwest will fly to Grand Cayman, Turks and Caicos, and Cabo San Lucas. On weekends, Southwest can even fly to Panama City.
March 9 can even be an exciting day in St. Louis, where Southwest plans to launch seasonal nonstop service to Cabo San Lucas. The airline will resume flights from St. Louis to Punta Cana on the identical day. Southwest will launch flights from Austin to Cozumel, Puerto Vallarta, and Panama City. All of the routes from Austin had previously been announced.
Click here for St. Louis – Punta Cana flights.
Southwest can also be expanding domestically. From Baltimore, it’s going to fly to Destin/Ft. Walton Beach just a few times weekly. Southwest will resume three seasonal Florida routes from St. Louis to Palm Beach, Pensacola, and Destin/Ft. Walton Beach. Each day from St. Louis to San Francisco will resume on March 7. With one weekly Saturday flight, Puerto Rico might be added to Austin’s list of Southwest destinations on March 9. On the 7, Southwest will resume every day flights to Charleston.
Click here for Austin – Charleston flights.
Recent Southwest Airlines news
Last week, Southwest announced it was converting a few of its Boeing 737 MAX 7 (737-7) orders to the MAX 8s (737-8) due to delays within the certification technique of the MAX 7s. Though Southwest swapped 24 aircraft from MAX 7 orders to MAX 8s, the carrier still has a major amount of the smaller variant on order. The carrier expects to receive almost 400 recent aircraft from Boeing in the approaching years.
Photo: Lukas Souza | Easy Flying
Southwest provided Easy Flying with the next statement,
The order book activity disclosed is standard with what we have been doing for some time now. We have been exercising options because the exercise dates arise, and we have been converting -7 firm orders to -8 firm orders as we go for the reason that -7 remains to be not yet certified. The larger takeaway is that we’re working with Boeing to reflow our order book in a way that gives orderly and measured growth in 2024 and beyond.
The Dallas-based airline expected to receive MAX 7s soon and has planned its network in accordance with those expectations, but now that the MAX 7 will not be certified until 2024, the airline needed to act. Swapping the orders is not going to be an issue for Southwest because it already operates almost 200 MAX 8s. Boeing has two other variants of the MAX family, the -9 and -10, but Southwest doesn’t currently have outstanding orders for either type.