Originally Posted by
SOBE ER DOC
Personally, I've never understood why this is the case in Philly. My thought was its proximity to JFK and EWR made it a harder sell. The other issue is Philly's primary economic drivers: healthcare and education, neither of which are as "global" of businesses as finance and tech are.
My sense is that OW carriers who need the feeder traffic beyond NY will look to add service to PHL. QR may have been the first example of such as move as QR seems to be adding service to many AA/US hubs, though not sur ehow the PHL service is doing. I would expect to see AB add service to TXL and either AA or JL add service to NRT. Would not hold my breath on CX as east coast feeder traffic can be serviced via a combination of ORD, DFW and JFK. No need for IB to start service to PHL but could reason a second daily flight (or larger aircraft) between PHL and MAD to support onward connections.
My thinking has been the same as yours. It probably doesn't make sense for a foreign carrier to set up operations at PHL for a once-daily flight when JFK is right up the road. Even Alitalia doesn't serve PHL and there is a strong community of recent-generation Italians flying back to FCO regularly. My own family are Italian immigrants and I remember us driving my grandparents to JFK when they went back to Italy for their 6 months of the year in the late 80's, although I think AZ did fly there for a while.
CX just added BOS, so between there and JFK, they're probably all set as far as feed goes.
If anything, it wouldn't shock me to see a middle east carrier come in and fly a fifth freedom segment to Europe en route to their hub. If it happened to be to AMS or ZRH, that'd be great. MXP too, but there's already trouble on the Emirates JFK-MXP route from the Italian government.