Orlando On Losing End Of $1.4B AirTran Sale

ORLANDO, Fla. — Orlando is on the losing end of Southwest Airlines' buy-out of Orlando-based AirTran Airlines. The deal was announced Monday and it's worth $1.4 billion, plus billions more in AirTran's debt.

The headquarters will be moving from Orlando to Dallas and likely taking a lot of jobs with it.

AirTran employs about 700 people at Orlando International Airport. When you add contractor jobs, that number may be closer to 1,000. Now, big changes are coming for many of those employees.

Diedre Wills has worked ticket lines at AirTran for two years. She only found out about the buy-out via email Monday morning.

"Anytime you have a merger, you know, you have the possibility of losing a job or something like that. But, like I said, I'm not worried about it. Southwest is a good company," Wills said.

Southwest Airlines CEO Gary Kelly said Monday the time was finally right for the long-discussed acquisition, expanding routes into dozens of new AirTran cities.

But Kelly emphasized the AirTran brand, and its corporate headquarters in Orlando, are on their way out. Although the total number of Southwest jobs will climb, locations will change.

"Executive positions clearly would be here in Dallas. Beyond that, it will become an integration task," Kelly said.

"I think that, certainly, there will be a loss of some jobs as they assimilate some of that corporate structure," said Mark Johnston, Ph. D., Rollins College, Crummer School of Business.

Johnston said even lower-level AirTran employees may be asked to transfer cities.

Earlier this summer, the city and state helped fund AirTran's new operations center with more than $5 million in construction and tax incentives. Now, Johnston says the very corporate cache that AirTran brought Orlando is diminished.

"When somebody's looking to come to Orlando, you want to make a strong case that there's a lot of companies based here already. One of those arguments is going away in the long-term," he said.

City officials admitted Monday the corporate loss of AirTran is a blow, but they are mostly focused on keeping people employed.

AirTran is one of Orlando's larger companies. AirTran was ranked 765 in Fortune Magazine's top 1,000 corporations.

Darden restaurants is still Orlando's only Fortune 500 company, but AirTran, with 8,000 employees company-wide, is nowhere near the area's largest employer. Disney employs more than 62,000 workers.

The acquisition moves Southwest into 37 new cities. The largest of those is Atlanta, where Delta Air Lines is based. Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson International airport is the nation's busiest, and a primary hub for business travelers, a group that Southwest has increasingly been targeting because they tend to pay higher fares.

The acquisition also gives Southwest a bigger slice of the market in cities like Boston and New York, major East Coast cities, where it has been expanding. The deal is also a boost to Southwest's plans to expand internationally. The Dallas carrier gains routes to Mexico and the Caribbean, where fellow discount airline JetBlue Airways has a big presence.

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