Wanna get away for the holidays this year on Southwest Airlines? According to Travel Tools on Southwest.com, they won’t be opening their late fall and early winter schedule extension until June 2, 2016. Mark your calendars if you want to be in on the schedule and fares, and plan to be up early as the schedule extensions historically have loaded between 6am and 8am central time. 
In the meantime, Southwest is expanding its current route network by offering new non-stop service between the following cities on Tuesday April 12, 2016:
- Atlanta – Greenville-Spartanburg
- Baltimore/Washington (BWI) – Minneapolis/St. Paul
- Chicago (Midway) – Dayton
- Chicago (Midway) – Flint
- Chicago (Midway) – Grand Rapids
- Los Angeles (LAX) – Liberia, Costa Rica
- New York (Newark) – Orlando
- New York (Newark) – Las Vegas
- Phoenix – Wichita
- St. Louis – Des Moines
- St. Louis – Wichita
More new non-stop city pairs will be added on Sunday June 5, 2016:
- Buffalo/Niagara Falls – Denver
- Charleston – Denver
- Cleveland – St. Louis
- Dallas (Love Field) – Burbank
- Dallas (Love Field) – Pensacola
- Denver – Norfolk/Virginia Beach
- Kansas City – Pensacola
- Oakland – Reno/Tahoe
- Oakland – St. Louis
- Portland, OR – St. Louis
And on June 5, 2016, service starts from Long Beach Airport (LGB) – Southwest’s fifth airport in the LA basin – with four flights a day between LGB and OAK.
A third set of new non-stop city pairs starts on Sunday August 7, 2016:
- Baltimore/Washington (BWI) – Sacramento
- Burbank – Portland, OR
- Ft. Lauderdale – Nassau, Bahamas
- Los Angeles (LAX) – Pittsburgh
- Milwaukee – San Diego
- Nashville – Charlotte
- Ontario – Portland, OR
Bottom Line
While many of these service expansions are one-a-day non-stop flights, Southwest continues to connect the dots on their route map. It will also be interesting to see if/when Southwest will receive more slots to operate in and out of the Long Beach airport, and able to become more meaningful competition to jetBlue.
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So, contrary to the poorly written headline, the schedule extension is not happening on Tuesday.