Originally Posted by
narvik
They've been doing that a lot recently: routing to/through IAD instead of EWR for quite a few East Coast airports. Problems with gate availability at EWR being cited as one of the reasons, IIRC.
As much as EWR gets a bad rap, connecting through IAD is really not that ideal....although to be fair, I haven't actually tried it so I really shouldn't knock it!
Yes, this is deliberate. In one of the recent investor presentations, it was mentioned that some airports were generating disproportionately large volumes of domestic connecting traffic over EWR. Some of those flows have shifted to IAD, where they can be served more reliably and at lower cost, both in terms of operating cost (IAD being less expensive on a cost per enplanement basis than EWR) and opportunity cost (i.e., EWR slots can be deployed to more valuable local or domestic-to-international connecting markets). So, all things being equal, UA would rather serve the domestic XXX-YYY-ZZZ passenger via IAD than EWR.