Southwest just added 31 last-minute Super Bowl flights: How the airline courts sports fans

If you want to be in New Orleans next weekend to cheer on the Kansas City Chiefs or the Philadelphia Eagles, Southwest Airlines is ready to take you there.

The Dallas-based carrier just added 31 new flights for fans traveling to watch the 2025 Super Bowl in New Orleans on Sunday, Feb. 9.

The extra flights boost capacity between Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport and the home airports of the two Super Bowl teams: Philadelphia International Airport (PHL) and Missouri’s Kansas City International Airport (MCI).

• Feb. 7: Kansas City — New Orleans: 7 added flights
• Feb. 7: Philadelphia — New Orleans: 5 added flights
• Feb. 8: Kansas City — New Orleans: 2 added flights
• Feb. 8: Philadelphia — New Orleans: 1 added flight
• Feb. 10: New Orleans — Kansas City: 10 added flights
• Feb. 10: New Orleans — Philadelphia: 6 added flights

All of the flights are already available for sale — and while they are expensive (one-way fares start at around $700), they’re surely cheaper than a seat inside the Caesars Superdome next Sunday.

While many airlines like to add special one-off flights for big-ticket events, few are as aggressive with special schedules for these major events as Southwest. (Last year alone, Southwest added 341 extra flights, supporting a whopping 61 events, such as the Kentucky Derby and the college football season.)

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In the days leading up to National Football League’s conference championship games, Dan Smith, Southwest’s director of current schedules told TPG how Southwest to add so many special last-minute flights to its schedule.

“We’ve been fortunate the last six months where earlier in 2024, we took a very conservative approach with our fleet and so we ended up having some airplanes available to deploy for a lot of these big opportunities… college football games, NFL Games, Taylor Swift concerts, music festivals, you name it,” Smith said in an exclusive interview with TPG.

Having spare airplanes is essential to making last-minute flying work. Otherwise, the airline would need to disrupt existing flights — and the passengers booked on them — that have already been selling for months.

Smith, of course, recognizes this, so changes to regularly scheduled commercial service to accommodate extra flying aren’t an option.

“One of the constraints that we have is we do not disrupt our existing schedule that’s already out for sale. So we have to work around that,” he said.

That said, the Super Bowl is a predictable event that happens every year, so Southwest “does some proactive measures,” Smith said, to ensure that it can accommodate last-minute flights for fans heading to the big game.

Smith said Southwest always has additional flights for sale within a few minutes of each championship game ending, a move meant to ensure that it captures as much demand as possible.

To do that, Smith’s team has spent the previous week building contingency schedules of all four scenarios with different teams winning. When each game is finished, the team essentially deletes the additional flights that would’ve been added for the losing team and hits “publish” on the flights that it will actually fly.

By doing all this prep, the carrier ensures that it’s “working around the existing schedule in New Orleans, the number of gates that we have there and overnight parking spots. And not just for New Orleans, but also the airports where the flights are coming from,” said Smith.

Naturally, Southwest can’t necessarily predict just how many fans (and local media and other interested parties) will travel to the Super Bowl each year, so it’s a bit of a guessing game for Smith’s team to figure out just how many flights to add.

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In the case of the Kansas City Chiefs, however, Southwest did tap into historical data to see “which teams travel well, and in the case of the Super Bowl with the Kansas City Chiefs, this is the third year in a row that they have a chance to go. So we have a really good understanding of the demand and data on how many flights that we could offer if they were to make it to the Super Bowl again,” according to Smith.

Adding extra flight sections just a few days before the event is a unique moment for network planners like Smith. While they might typically be poring over competitors’ schedules to try to find pockets of unmet demand, these last-minute decisions are made largely without accounting for competitive dynamics.

“We don’t know what the other airlines are planning,” Smith said, who added that he and his team might look at what his competitors are charging for flights to New Orleans during Super Bowl week to see if Southwest’s fares and schedules could stimulate demand. (Delta Air Lines, he said, also likes to add last-minute flights and would likely be considered a key competitor in this case.)

If you book one of these last-minute flights, don’t expect much to change about the Southwest experience. You’ll still need to line up to board — assigned seating doesn’t kick in until later this year — and it’s not like the planes will be painted in team colors.

What you might see, however, are some Easter eggs that show you’re flying on a special flight. One such indicator is the flight number — Smith’s team likes to assign special flight numbers that have some connection to the Super Bowl.

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He can’t always do that, however, if a given number is already assigned to a regularly scheduled flight.

“As much as we would like to use flight number 15 on a Kansas City to New Orleans flight on Friday, unfortunately, that flight number’s already in use,” Smith said, referencing the jersey number of Kansas City star quarterback Patrick Mahomes. “So we’re not going to change an existing flight to free it up, but if it’s not in use on Saturday, we’ll use it on a Saturday flight. We’ll use some numbers of the more popular players and things like that. Just to add a fun element to it.”

Aside from the Super Bowl (and other predictable big-ticket events), Smith’s team of four is in charge of figuring out if other events might warrant last-minute extra flights. One tool that they use allows them to “basically flag it if there’s a market that’s booking up faster than we would anticipate,” a likely indicator that something is going on around the time of the flight.

Sometimes, however, Smith’s team hears about events from its airport employees. “Matter of fact, I just got an email this morning from one of our employees in San Juan, Puerto Rico, where Bad Bunny has a residence, concert series … . So that’ll be something that we’ll add to the list to look at,” Smith said. (No word yet if said employee would win free concert tickets if Southwest ends up successfully adding and selling out flights there.)

As for who Smith was rooting for ahead of this year’s conference championship games, he said it’s “honestly really a toss-up between Kansas City and Buffalo. Both of those teams travel extremely well … . For Philadelphia and the Commanders, we’re a little bit bigger in the Baltimore, Washington D.C. area, so I guess I’d lean a little bit more that way, but you know, we do well in Philadelphia as well.”

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