Originally Posted by
Seby12
A lot of Origin and Destination from MCO to Latin America. Would also be more convenient to not have to stop at MIA for the large Latin American population in Orlando.
Also more direct if flying from the Caribbean to the West. For example it makes no sense to fly SXM-EWR/IAD/ORD to the west.
I'm not sure MCO makes more sense than routing Caribbean origins through IAH.
To your original question, if they would utilize IAD better for the Southeast US, I don't think they need to add any new hubs. And I don't think adding a hub at MCO would help that much with the SE.
As far as cutting, CLE was the easy one. I wouldn't cut any others.
I don't know the business case for or against this, but UA used to have some airports that were kind of like mini-hubs. They may have called them "focus cities" or something like that. IIRC, they had a couple onward flights to smaller or specialty destinations. Kind of like CLE is (or at least was right after dehubbing, not sure now). MCO or TPA might make sense to serve the southeast and Caribbean in this manner.