Southwest to open flights from BUR to SFO

The pillars near the Southwest Airlines ticket counter at Bob Hope Airport were festooned in balloons on Tuesday — blue, red and yellow ones spiraled the columns, topped with giant, gold-foil helium ones in the shapes of letters spelling SFO.

On the wall behind the counter, old-fashioned travel posters featured images of the Golden Gate Bridge and the Transamerica Pyramid.

Brad Hawkins, a spokesman for the airline, stood at a podium to announce new nonstop service set to begin in January, with tickets on sale this week.

“We’re not very subtle here,” Hawkins said. “I think you can probably figure out there’s a new destination.”

The destination, of course, is San Francisco International Airport, which has the airport code SFO. United Airlines is the only carrier currently offering nonstop service from Burbank to San Francisco.

The new route, with three flights a day Sunday through Friday and two flights on Saturdays, means Southwest will be providing service to all three Bay Area airports from the Burbank airfield.

It’s the first new route the airline has added at the Burbank airport since 2011, when it added service to Denver, he said. The airline began service at Burbank 25 years ago with 12 flights daily to Las Vegas, but the new route brings its schedule to more than 40 flights serving seven destinations.

Hawkins said the airline has followed a simple formula — give travelers routes to the places they want to travel at the times they want to travel and at a great fare — to become the largest domestic carrier in the United States in terms of passengers boarded, according to U.S. Department of Transportation statistics.

The effect of that formula, dubbed “the Southwest effect” by the Department of Transportation in 1993, leads to lower prices on airlines competing with Southwest and increased ticket sales for all airlines in the market. Southwest officials said the new route could be a “perfect example” of that effect.

“The Southwest effect lives,” Hawkins said, adding later that the airline is not merely a tenant of the local airfield, but one of its “economic-development partners.”

Dan Feger, the airport’s executive director, said he hopes the relationship will continue. Airport staff members have been working to attract additional airline service and new carriers, and has started exploring a rebranding effort in hopes of attracting more passengers. He also said the airport would welcome even more new routes.

The newest route, serviced by Boeing 737s that offer a “more comfortable atmosphere” than smaller regional jets, and the airline’s “bags fly free” policy create “a recipe for success for San Francisco,” said Mike Sikes, senior manager for network planning and performance with Southwest, hinting at the possibility of other new routes to come.

Fares from Burbank to San Francisco will be competitive with the fares on the airline’s flights out of Los Angeles International Airport to the same destination, Sikes said. That means passengers won’t have to drive to LAX, he said.

“[They can] use what’s convenient,” he added.

Hawkins said Southwest passengers prefer the convenience of the Burbank airport, which attracts customers from “far afield” of Burbank and the San Fernando Valley.

Airport spokeswoman Lucy Burghdorf said she is excited about the new route and a $49 promotional fare for one-way tickets available through Friday for flights between Jan. 6 and March 8.

“Travelers now have an alternative,” she said.