Dallas is a big enough market to have not just one, but two commercial airports: ugly, big, inconvenient and expensive Dallas-Fort Worth (DFW) --- home hub to American Airlines, and small, close-in, friendly, easy to use, affordable Love Field (DAL). Being a smart traveler, I don't think I have to tell y'all which one is better.


Love Field is Convenient...
It doesn't take much grey matter to figure out that Love Field friggin' blows away DFW when it comes to the convenience factor. After all, if you're coming from downtown Dallas, you probably drove right past Love Field to get to DFW.

From Downtown Dallas, you can be at Love Field in 5 or 10 minutes. Or, you can sit in traffic for another 30 or 40 minutes as you navigate the construction delays of the Dallas freeway maze. Your choice...

I exaggerate only slightly. If you take a quick gander at a map of the D-FW area, you can see for yourself that I speak the truth. Use a web site like Yahoo maps to estimate time and distances, and you'll see that there is indeed no comparison. It's a total slam-dunk. Love Field is 3-1/2 miles away from the big convention center hotels around the Market Center area (3.7 to be exact, door-to-door from the Wyndham Anatole, 3.5 from the Rennaissance Hotel). Catch light traffic and few red lights, and you are indeed at Love Field in 5 minutes. During busy rush hour traffic, it might take 15, tops.

So while Yahoo maps says it's 7 miles from the Courthouse in downtown Dallas to Love Field, it also tells me that it's over 20 miles to DFW.

Maps don't lie. DFW marketing folks who tell you their airport is "convenient" do.


Love Field is Easy to Use...
Love Field is a much smaller airport than DFW. That translate to ease of use. You don't have miles-long concourses to navigate and hike through as you hunt for your gate amid milling throngs of delayed passengers. You don't have multiple terminals at all.

Lines are shorter at Love Field. Distances are shorter. Facilities are closer and easier to use.

Love Field doesn't have the shopping mall feel of DFW, with its dozens of gift shops and restaurants, but then, I'm not in the airport to shop or dine, I'm there to catch a flight.

Drive a car to Love Field, and it's pretty easy to snag a spot in the garages directly across the street from the terminal building. Park at DFW, and even if you have a "close" spot in the terminal garage, you're really hiking further than a Love Field passenger would. Love Field handles about 1/9the the number of passengers and flights as DFW. It doesn't take much figgerin' to realize that you're MUCH more likely to get a good parking spot at Love Field, you'll walk shorter distances from the car to the terminal, and you'll pay less for it too.

What else do air passengers care about? Well, judging from the stats on the U.S. Department of Transportation web site (www.dot.gov/airconsumer), the most common complaint is about on-time performance. It's hard to figure out the overall on-time performance of Love Field, since it isn't one of the nation's busiest airports, and hence, doesn't have it's stats calculated the same way, but eyeballing the month to month stats over a year, you can see that, in general, Love Field has a better performance rating than DFW (by about 3-4% in a typical month). That kind of stands to reason since Love is dominated by Southwest (which is the nation's number 2 on-time performer in 2004 with an 80.1 on-time record) while DFW is dominated by American (which is number 7 in on-time performance with a 76.8 percent on-time record). Makes sense that Love would have better on-time performance anyway since DFW is a huge hub where flights stack up when there's any kind of delay at all, whereas Love has fewer flights and much wider gap windows, so flights tend to just come straight in at Love...and the stats do reflect a general trend towards better reliability at Love than at DFW.

Ease of use. Love Field has it. DFW? Hahahahahaha!


Love Field is Cheap...
On average, it's cheaper to fly in and out of Love Field than it is out of Dallas-Fort Worth. A big reason for this is that Southwest operates 90% of the flights that go out of Love Field, and everyone knows that Southwest is the act to beat when it comes to low fares in the domestic market. That's probably why most other airlines also concentrate their flights through DFW...so they can "compete" with higher-average-fare American rather than discount leader Southwest.

Personally, I don't fly either American or Southwest very often. I usually fly Continental, and I fly most often out of Houston where Continental is the dominant carrier. Lucky for me, there are enough smart Houstonians who know that Love Field friggin' knocks the socks off DFW, so there's plenty of market demand for a pretty much hourly shuttle service out of either Bush or Hobby. Continental is using their smaller Embraer regional jets from Houston Bush Airport into Love Field. Continental's fares are usually about the same to either Love or DFW, except for when Southwest is touting their services from Houston Hobby to Love, in which case Continental often matches and flies into Love cheaper than into DFW.

Don't matter to me why or how or who, what does matter is that in general, for the same routes, when there is a price difference, it's cheaper to fly into Love than it is into DFW. Bottom line.

But there's more to saving money than just the fares. Taxi fare to/from Love is LOTS cheaper, and parking is LOTS cheaper.

Taxi fares from Dallas to Love Field cost about 1/3 what they do from Dallas to DFW (after all, it's about 3-4 times further to DFW than to Love, and the taxi driver deserves to be paid for that extra half hour each way).

Covered parking in the closest garage to the main terminal at DFW costs $16 per day. Covered parking in the closest garage to the main terminal at Love costs $10 per day. But that's not really comparing apples to apples since the parking at Love is also better and closer than at DFW. To be fair, Garage B at Love is more equivalent to what you get for that $16 at DFW. Garage B at Love costs $7 per day.

So, to get a good, covered parking spot, the difference for a knowledgable traveler is $9 per day. Add that to the savings from having generally lower fares to beging with, plus the value of saved time by avoiding that extra commute hassel out to DFW, and I think you start to see why I think using Love Field is so much smarter than using DFW.


So Why Doesn't EVERYBODY Use Love Field?
DFW and American Airlines have an unnatural hammerlock on Dallas air consumers, due to the unfair, wildly ridiculously, repugnant, socially irresponsible piece of underhanded, graft-induced legislation known as "the Wright Amendment" (no, I really have no personal feelings at all on this unfair, wildly ridiculously, repugnant, socially irresponsible piece of underhanded, graft-induced legislation).

In case you're one of the 2 or 3 air consumers who don't know what the Wright Amendment is, it's basically sleaze politics meant to hurt Southwest Airlines and the people of Dallas in order to given unfair trade benefits to American Airlines by protecting its DFW hub so that American doesn't have to compete with Southwest on equal footing.

Unfortunately, American has been able to pay off enough lobbyists and campaign funds to keep the Wright amendment from being totally overturned. As a result, there are some reasons for travelers to use DFW.

Southwest is unjustly barred from operating flights to and from Dallas except within Texas and neighboring states. That's what the Wrong Amendment does, so it basically sucks to be Southwest.

That also means that if you're flying cross-country to/from Dallas, you don't have a choice. You fly American (or another high-dollar carrier) into DFW, or you take the bus.

Love Field also doesn't have Customs and Immigration services, so there's no flights to or from foreign destinations. Again, if you're in Dallas and you want to do a vacation outside the U.S., you're going to be using DFW.

And while me and anybody headed to the Dallas side of the DFW Metroplex are better off using the more convenient Love Field, there are some folks going to the Fort Worth side. DFW is closer to Fort Worth than Dallas, so for those folks too, using DFW makes sense even if the fares are slightly higher than those from Love.

There's also folks who just plain don't like flying Southwest. As I said, Southwest operates 90 percent of the flights that use Love Field. The only other airlines that serve it are Delta Connection, ExpressJet, and Continental Express --- all with smaller aircraft. If you don't like Embraers, ATRs, and Fairchild Metros, you're either gonna be flying Southwest (which flies 737s out of Love), or you're going to be flying American (or somebody else) out of DFW.


Gotta Choice in Airports? Remember, All You Need Is Love!
When I fly into Dallas, I far prefer to use Love Field than DFW. Easy access to downtown Dallas is the biggest reason --- Love Field just plain saves me time. But Love Field is also a smaller, more manageable and easy to use airport, and near and dear to my bargain-loving heart, it also saves me money.

For me, Love Field is the smart choice. Due to unjust pork-politics, a lot of y'all won't be able to make the choice at all. That's a real shame, because if you could, you'd see why Love Field is such a cool, convenient little airport to use.

I don't need no stinkin' DFW Airport --- all THIS traveller needs is LOVE!



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