Southwest reveals five routes from Fresno and Santa Barbara

Southwest will add Fresno and Santa Barbara from April.  These will join another California airport, Palm Springs, which launched in December 2020. In all, Southwest will serve 13 California airports this year, with Oakland its most-served by seats. The state remains the carrier’s number-one by total seat capacity.

Southwest has today (21 January) announced that it’ll add five routes from Fresno and Santa Barbara, both new airports to its network. 

As is customary for the carrier, it announced its intention to Fresno and Santa Barbara about a month ago, just without any route details – although it is normally easy to predict its new routes.

Denver and Las Vegas will feature from both airports – and with nearly the same schedule.

In all, Southwest will have 28 weekly flights from Fresno and 35 from Santa Barbara.

Southwest is replacing Contour Airlines from Santa Barbara to Las Vegas and Oakland. The regional operator used 30-seat Embraer 135s.

It served Las Vegas between October 2018 and April 2020, OAG data shows.  Pre-coronavirus, it had between seven and 11 weekly flights each way, and 24,240 round-trip seats in 2019.

Oakland had the same timeframe, and typically operated once-daily – and 13-weekly in summer.  It had 29,460 seats with Contour in 2019.

Surf Air also plied the 424-kilometre link with Oakland between 2018 and 2020. 

In its early days, it had up to 25 weekly services using nine-seat Pilatus PC-12s from Advanced Air, although it reduced to three-weekly after the pandemic hit.