Originally Posted by
DLASflyer
There is a monumental shift from business to leisure travel happening in the United States. Today, JetBlue announced
two dozen new routes on top of the
30 new routes announced in June and
6 new routes in July. American announced
23 new routes last week, the same day Southwest added
new routes from new stations in Florida,
Colorado and California. Yesterday United unveiled plans for
seven new long haul international routes on top of the
12 new Florida routes added in August. Alaska just added
three new ski routes and in July added
12 new routes from LAX.
The last new route press release in Delta News Hub is
from January 17th. As far as I can tell, the only new route added since March is 2x daily SEA-ONT. I find it remarkable one of the world's largest airlines cannot find any new routes worth trying during such a dramatic shift in travel patterns with aircraft and crews sitting idle. I recognize the drop in overall demand for air travel but is Delta being too conservative?
Hey, you forgot IND-MEM starting Oct 1: 😂😂
https://www.flymemphis.com/NewsDetails?newsid=5336
In all seriousness, Delta probably thinks it already covers many of the leisure markets decently well...the current areas of the country that are doing well in terms of air travel demand are the Mountain west and Florida and the South. DL already has a strong presence in both of those with SLC and a ATL (as well as many Northeast-FL flights) and so doesn’t need to add more.
Internationally, the VFR markets (Caribbean and Africa) and holiday resorts in Mexico/Caribbean are the big ones right now and again, DL already had a decent network to those areas, so it just needs to reactivate it’s existing network rather than add more. For example UA is adding ACC and LOS (both big VFR markets), both of which DL has already been serving for quite a while.
DL has also added some frequencies to CUN from existing gateways (eg LAX goes from daily to 10x weekly in Nov and then 2x daily from Dec; JFK-CUN goes to 3x daily starting Dec for the whole winter, etc).