Originally Posted by
buckeyefanflyer
The point is United promised to keep service to key destinations. So BOS, DCA, and LGA are gone. United flew these routes 50 years ago. Delta still flies to many key airports from CVG. These cutbacks also may mean employee job loss.
I am not a fan of massive hubs to make airplanes and people and long walks to gates.
Need more medium size hubs. CVG, STL, CLE, RDU, BNA, PIT, MEM should have been kept.
The world has moved on. The medium sized hubs became uneconomical because of their heavy RJ reliance and smaller percentage of O&D flyers. The ULCC's have now come in to many of these former hubs and are filling a void for the O&D's leisure flyers who are just looking for cheaper fares and non-stop flights to the more popular markets and who don't really care about networks. This has already happened in Europe and now it's happening here. There's still a place in the world for the legacy network airlines, but it's going to be a smaller percentage of traffic and most leisure flyers are happy not having to pay the hub hostage rates on those airlines any more. With WN's growth over recent years, you could say they have smallish hubs in STL and BNA even though they are more O&D focused than the legacies. Being DTW based, I frequently see WN selling connecting options through them. DL apparently has enough of a business market in CVG to maintain an O&D focused hub there. However, they did completely make MEM a spoke dropping even the Florida leisure market flights from there. UA seems to have enough of a FF base at CLE to at least keep the Florida routes, but couldn't profitably make a focus city work like DL at CVG.