Originally Posted by ashill

I thought rebanking (ie moving from more banks to fewer larger ones or moving from a rolling hub to a banked hub) generally drives up costs because you have to staff for the peak and then pay employees to be idle between banks. It's going for revenue because customers (including me) as well as, eg, Google Flights's "best flights" algorithm often sort by (or at least consider) total travel time when searching for flights, so efficient connections win. Those shorter connections and congestion certainly introduce operational challenges, and reducing those can be a cost savings, but I don't think the operational cost savings outweigh the staffing cost increases.