Southwest Airlines Accelerates Its Hawaii Expansion
For most of the past year, Southwest Airlines (NYSE: LUV) has been delaying its plans for growth in Hawaii. Initially, it took a little longer than expected for the carrier to gain FAA approval to begin long overwater flights. This scuttled its ambition to launch at least one route to Hawaii before the end of 2018. Ultimately, Southwest wasn't able to begin flying to Hawaii until March 2019.
More recently, the grounding of the Boeing 737 MAX prevented Southwest from expanding quickly beyond its initial set of four West Coast-Hawaii routes and two interisland routes.
However, Southwest Airlines announced last month that it was ready to resume its growth in Hawaii. And earlier this week, the popular low-fare airline accelerated and expanded its plans to add more service to and within Hawaii, challenging incumbents Hawaiian Holdings (NASDAQ: HA) and Alaska Air (NYSE: ALK).
Source Fool.com
