jenae

ET Air cancelled my flight ADD-IAD (with no notice to me) and re-routed me to Brussels on ET 704. What they didn't tell me, and I only learned once on the plane, was that ET 704 flies from ADD to Paris, waits on the ground for 1.5 hours refueling (off-loading Paris bound pax), and then flies about 35 minutes to Brussels, which is the termination of the flight.

How is it at all economically advantageous to do it this way? Had I known, I of course would have had them route me through Paris, and fly back to IAD from there. Instead, we were not allowed to deplane, or even to leave our SEATS for most of the time, on the ground in Paris, and a nearly-empty plane flew 32 minutes onward to Brussels.

Just can't imagine why it makes sense for them to do this.

Indelaware

ET may very well find that it doesn't have the passenger traffic to support both ADD-CDG and ADD-BRU nonstops. By offering ADD-CDG-BRU they can serve both markets -- offering Paris customers nonstop service and Brussels customers direct service.

The better question is why would you leave it to ET to make a rebooking offer before researching your own preferred alternatives? Never rely on an airline - any airline - to find the best option.

jenae

They definitely couldn't do both markets, but I am surprised that the economic factors would favor doing both this way--the cost just of flying that short flight alone would seem to outweigh revenue. I was wondering if there is something about having valuable rights at airports, etc.

Anyway, the reason to leave rebooking to them might be that it is morning and you just discovered they cancelled your evening flight (I had been checking on the flights, with no indications of any change), your phone and the internet access is slower than molasses, and you are the only adult and discovered all this en route to taking 3 young children swimming, so they are standing there literally in their goggles. Not the worst scenario to be in by any shot, but not conducive to optimal rebooking.

B747-437B

The tag leg to BRU is primarily in place for the huge amount of freight business that ET does from there.

JerryFF

I know of at least one other ET route like that - ET 807 (and its return ET 806) flies ADD KGL BJM and it is only 40 minutes between KGL (Kigali) and BJM (Bujumbura).

dvs7310

Within Africa there are quite a few of them, they just don't have enough traffic to fly to each of the cities individually. Ones coming to mind at the moment are:

ADD-LLW-BLZ
ADD-LUN-HRE
ADD-JRO-ZNZ
ADD-FBM-NLA
ADD-DLA-SSG

The route map for their subsidiary ASky out of Lome is more like a bus map, almost every route they operate is multi-city.

Often1

A lot of carriers run these triangular routes A-B-C-A, where B&C are very close to each other. Useful when neither B nor C can support a flight or the frequency, but together they can.

As to this routing, surely you must have noticed that the run to BRU was 2 hours longer than it ought to have been.