In setback for South Florida travelers, Southwest will shift international flights out of Fort Lauderdale

In what looms as a major takeaway for Southwest Airlines customers flying from South Florida to the Caribbean, the Texas-based carrier says it is shifting its international flight operations from Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport to Orlando by June of next year.

It also intends to move its South Florida crew base to Orlando. The airline, which is one of the Broward County airport’s predominant carriers as measured by flights and passengers, confirmed the moves during a quarterly earnings call with Wall Street analysts.

In a news release, the airline said that effective June 4, 2024, flights out of Orlando International Airport would start to Cancun, Mexico; Grand Cayman, Cayman Islands; Nassau, Bahamas; Providenciales, Turks and Caicos; Punta Cana, Dominican Republic and San José, Costa Rica.

“These new routes complement existing service from Orlando to Aruba and Montego Bay, Jamaica,” the statement said.

But what the statement did not say is that service to those destinations out of Fort Lauderdale would cease on June 3, a point reported by the trade publication Travel Weekly. The publication also said Southwest intends to end its daily Fort Lauderdale flights to and from Havana, “leaving Tampa as its only gateway to Cuba.”

Asked Thursday if the additions in Orlando will result in subtractions in Fort Lauderdale, a spokeswoman replied that she had no further information to offer. She also did not respond when asked if the Travel Weekly article accurately described what the airline intends to do.

The Broward County Aviation Department had no immediate comment.

Southwest, besides its status as a leading operator at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International, also dominates the airport’s Terminal 1, which underwent a major expansion several years ago to accommodate the airline’s growth.

But among the nation’s airlines, growth aspirations are giving way to more efficient management of capacity, route networks and work forces as inflation and rising fuel and labor costs have driven wider quarterly financial losses.

“We are taking actions to accelerate the maturation of our developing markets and to optimize our schedules to current travel patterns,” said Southwest Chief Operating Officer Andrew Watterson, according to a transcript of the analysts call released by the airline. “The most recent examples at today’s announcement, they were shifting the bulk of the international service in Fort Lauderdale to Orlando. This will offer better connectivity in our domestic network via the nearly 140 daily departures at MCO.”

“The crew base in Orlando also makes the cost to serve that go down because you’re not staging crews down to Fort Lauderdale,” Watterson added. “So working both sides of the equation … revenue and costs, it made more sense for our international anchor in the Southeast to be Orlando.