American, JetBlue, US Airways trim routes

Airline travelers faced with higher fares, extra fees, endemic flight delays, overcrowded airports and the other usual hassles now have one more thing to worry about: Loss of service. As fuel costs continue their upward spiral, more airlines are taking a pruning shears to their schedules and eliminating capacity on their least profitable routes. This has quietly been going on for a while, and it seems to be increasing. Individual route cutbacks are hard to track because airlines typically don’t make announcements about them – they only announce the percentage of their overall schedule reduction. But word does get out, usually through local media. Among the latest service reductions:

· *American Airlines reportedly plans to discontinue service at Oakland, dropping its three daily Oakland-DFW flights September 3; American will also cut one daily departure between DFW and several other cities, including Boston, Charlotte, Washington National, Denver, Portland, San Jose, San Francisco and Tampa. In addition, American will drop service from Austin to Orange County (Calif.), Raleigh-Durham and Seattle; and will end flights from San Antonio to Los Angeles and Ft. Lauderdale.

· *US Airways reportedly plans to trim up to 10 routes from its Las Vegas hub in mid-August, although no details were immediately available.

· *JetBlue Airways has canceled its previously announced plans to begin service on May 21 out of Los Angeles International Airport to New York JFK and Boston. JetBlue said the decision not to open up service at LAX is temporary, but it gave no indication when those plans might get back on track.

The web site Farecompare.com said last week it conducted an analysis of schedule databases for fall 2008 vs. fall 2007 and found big drops in capacity at a number of airports. In some cases, these were due to airlines shutting down – like Aloha, Skybus and ATA. But the overall numbers indicate that travelers in many markets — especially smaller towns with limited service on regional carriers – might soon find fewer flights to choose from. The site said that compared to last fall, capacity in fall 2008 will be down 30 to 63 percent for various Hawaiian islands, and will be down 22 percent at Pittsburgh, 17 percent at Long Island’s MacArthur Airport, 17 percent at Oakland, 17 percent at Knoxville, 15 percent at Providence, and more than 14 percent at Cincinnati and Syracuse, for example. Farecompare.com said some smaller towns will have lost more than 40 percent of their scheduled service by this fall, including Modesto, Calif.; Decatur, Ill.; Kirksville, Mo.; Great Falls, Mont.; Carlsbad, N.M.; Saranac Lake, N.Y.; Huron, S.D.; and Port Angeles, Wash.