While the spat continues between Southwest Airlines and Delta for ownership of gates at Dallas Love Field, Virgin America is quietly making schedule changes.
The carrier is launching nonstop flights from Love Field to Las Vegas this winter.
It will operate two roundtrip flights a day to Las Vegas McCarran International Airport starting on December 1.
This means its current flights to Austin will be scrapped the day before – a route it says has ‘not met expectation.’
"While our overall performance across our longer-haul Dallas Love Field markets continues to beat the competition, our performance between Dallas and Austin did not meet our expectations," said Virgin America senior vice president of planning and sales John Macleod.
"We are limited to operating from two gates at Love Field, so adding flights to Las Vegas means we had to make tough decisions and redeploy our capacity from our lowest-performing operations."
Virgin will compete with dominant Southwest Airlines on the route.
"Our service will bring some needed product and fare competition to the nonstop route. Las Vegas has always been a strong market for us," added Virgin spokeswoman Christie O’Toole.
