Billiken

Four flights per week from CLE to KEF beginning in May of 2018.


http://www.icelandair.us/news/story/...and-to-europe/

MIDWESTERNFLYER

https://www.usatoday.com/story/trave...ies/591771001/

84fiero

Cool! Living in Dayton this is nice to see.

dangw20

Great for CVG to have 2 airlines flying transatlantic now!

Altaflyer

Iceland is full. Not sure where all these extra people are going to stay, tour etc...

Billiken

Agree.

We visiting last March (coincided with new moon lunar cycle).
Had rain, snow, and sunshine every day.

Lots of the sites were moderately crowded.
However, out private tour guide mentioned that in June/July there could be "10 times as many people" at key sites.

Still, glad we went

nomiiiii

Connect to Europe easily and cheaply, where else.

largeeyes

This is great for me to get home to Cincinnati, where prices were often sky high.

vincewy

Are they creating another set of banks at KEF?

At the moment they are 5-6 AM (US-EU) and 2-3 PM (EU-US) for most flights and I thought they would build more flights among those 2 banks.

I guess it might be cheaper to operate outside those banks since connection time may not be as critical for those who want bottom fares.

edit: I just did a mock booking, DTW-FRA, and the next connection flight is 6 am the following day, 19 hours at KEF for $149. I don't know how this is going to work unless all budget travelers are willing to sleep at KEF (which is frown upon) to save money. This works very well for stopovers though, however, the hotel situation is grim, basically no extra hotel rooms even if you're willing to pay sky high rates during peak periods.

dustman81

WOW! Air is also starting service to KEF in May 2018.

CLE going from zero transatlantic flights to two in the span of two days is awesome! No more having to go through DTW, ORD, JFK, EWR, or ATL, to go transatlantic.

Will CBP have the manpower to handle the traffic from these two new flights?

With all these flights from Iceland Air and WOW, wonder if KEF is going to get a preclearance facility?

irishguy28

KEF was announced as one of 11 target locations for preclearance in a DHS statement last year.

https://www.dhs.gov/news/2016/11/04/...sion-following

However, there are many, many airports in Europe with much larger passenger flows that don't have US pre-clearance. The only European airports to have this so far are SNN and DUB.

These figures are from Summer 2015 - and include Canada and Mexico flights, but still - and KEF's numbers will have increased since then...but you will see that, if mere numbers were the main criteria, there are a lot more airports that would be ahead of KEF in the list to get preclearance. However, few European countries other than Ireland have shown much enthusiasm for accepting US preclearance.

Braniff

And Icelandair's and WOW's hub strategy would collapse with preclearance. Hard to make 40 minute connections !

TFKEF

Exactly. Hard to make a case for US preclearance at an airport that is built around tight connections. The Americans are quite interested but it seems like a lousy deal for Iceland and the Icelandic carriers.

US-bound traffic from KEF is also heavily banked so for a couple of hours each afternoon you have a volume of passengers heading to the US which looks like what you would see at the big European hubs but outside those hours only sporadic traffic. There would need to be dozens of CBP officers on duty during the rush hour to process a few thousand passengers in a reasonable time but most of those officers would just be twiddling their thumbs for the rest of their working day.

corporate-wage-slave

There is a somewhat tongue-in-cheek article about the KEF-CLE options on WOW! and Icelandair in The Independent, here:
http://www.independent.co.uk/travel/...-a7912981.html

It's written by Simon Calder, who is probably the UK's leading travel journalist, certainly for newspapers. He speculates that the working model here is that a mid-west USA city that couldn't sustain a service to one European city can nevertheless operate where the KEF hub links into dozens of other European locations.

vincewy

Transiting through KEF from US/Canada to EU alone (and vice versa) is already a challenge, both carriers have banks of about 1 hour at each direction and they have to clear EU immigration in the process. Only flights to UK and Ireland can make quick connections.

Space at non-Schengen area (I believe it's D concourse) is also an issue, there simply isn't enough room at KEF at the moment for both US-bound flights and all other countries outside Schengen.