Acapulco has experienced a large increase in crime due to the war between drug cartels. Federal police patrol the beaches these days because the violence has spilled over to the tourist areas.

There is also the matter of routes that have been given to JV partners, like LAX-LHR.

And is this intended as a route-drop thread, or a destination-drop thread?

Delta's dumping of the NW Saabs, and then about 340 CR2s and E145s, has been tough on the very small airports. But that is not uniquely true of Delta: look at how UA is dropping cities as it finally gets around to rationalizing prop and RJ flying.

well...
 

LAX-LHR doesn't really count. VS operated that route 2-3 times a day for years, since way before DL bought a stake in it. In 2015 VS gave DL one flight, then DL quickly gave it back. So it's not like this was some long-standing market that DL all of a sudden discontinued

I don't really see the point of this
 

Most of these routes weren't dropped because of the merger (is that what this thread is trying to assert? i'm not sure). Most were just dropped because either there was not enough demand OR because situations changed that made routes unprofitable. That kind of happens with most airlines all over the world. things change and airlines adjust. Thankfully, DL has relationships with many airlines that can still deliver you to most of the destinations that they have dropped. Or you can just fly another airline if you still want to go to those destinations.

believe it or not
 

You can STILL go to all of these places!! It's amazing!! You can either fly another airline, OR you can fly on Delta and connect to a partner to get to them. Isn't that shocking???

No, it's not sad at all
 

It's not sad at all. Airlines don't just for fun cancel flying that is profitable. These were all for the most part marginal routes with limited ability for profitable flying. Some were in markets where the market dynamic changed. Either way, if a market isn't profitable, an airline shouldn't fly it. The people running DL are pretty smart, and they recognize this. It's not sad. You can STILL get to all of these destinations, either via a connection to a Delta partner OR on another airline. the world is still accessible.

Yes and no. Yes, market dynamics change, other airlines strengthen hubs, alliances happen, and individual airlines might engage in practices to make life difficult for other airlines on a route. However Delta basically has decided in many cases to disengage from markets rather than compete. In long established markets this has two bad effects for their customers....Not only do their loyal customers lose the Delta route, which makes things somewhat inconvenient, but also after DL leaves rates on other carriers generally go up as there is one competitor less in the market.

Looking at two examples, BOM and IST. One can see now that DL's strategy at the time regarding BOM was DISASTROUS. They were the best and most respected airline JFK-BOM and had a loyal clientele, they had shifted the intermediate point from FRA to CDG as the years went by and lost no customers. When longer haul aircraft came on the scene, Indian carriers went nonstop. DL made the disastrous mistake of doing so from ATL, thinking connecting traffic would make it work. It did not. So DL abandoned the route to be flown with/through its partners via Europe.

IST I have spoken about many times, they could have maintained it, but by going from daily, to 5 a week in the winter, to 7 months a year and then 5 months killed them, and TK ate them up, putting 3x flights a day to JFK, not to mention another 11 flights to North America a day, including ATL, which DL never brought back and had been hugely successful when they flew it.

The shift away from turboprops would have happened anyway, but NWA was willing to fly you to every two stoplight town in the south from Memphis. DL dropped a lot of destinations.

If
 

IST - ATL had been hugely successful when delta flew it, as you claim, they would have continued it. Airlines dont just stop "hugely successful" routed for fun. They stop them if they're not doing well. So I really don't think it was "hugely successful".
Turkish flooded the us market in a way that out way more seats into the USA-turkey market than there was demand for. Their government subsidizes them so they can afford to do this. Fares to turkey are absurdly cheap. Delta can match that fare but it has decided not to. No amount of service can justify a higher fare, so I'm interested in how you think delta could have competed.
As far as Bombay, it's sad but it's a huge market from the USA but fairly low yielding. Hard to make it work.

Outside of IST, it is not like many of the Transatlantic flights were to destinations that were popular from the United States. Turkish has flooded the market with cheap fares and there was not enough business traffic to sustain that type of flight. It also did not help that Delta really does not have the type of airplane that would be good to operate that flight. You essentially need a plane like AA had in the A300 to the Caribbean. Cram the seats in in Y with a small J cabin up front. It is outside of the range of the 75S and the 767/A330 have larger premium cabins than needed. If Delta were to reconfigure the A330-200 to take out the mini-cabin and replace that with Y you might be able to have the configuration needed to do a JFK-IST profitably. The question then becomes what other routes could such a configuration also support, because IST is not really a destination you have a specialized fleet for. Possibly having a year-round non-stop HNL service from JFK? Cruise destinations during the summer months where there is high Y demand but less J?

Delta never flew to BRO and I don't think NW did either. But they did fly to AMA and and MFE. Mostly this is due to the dehubbing of DFW before the merger but some of it lasted beyond the dehub. I don't recall DL going to CRP but I am far from sure.

Not thrilling, but TOL and HTS. I believe HTS was the last CVG-exclusive destination in the network.

I'm not sure I understand this logic as nearly all of these routes were DL routes in the first place. DL still has a much more robust international route network than NW ever had. So what exactly is the issue here?

The pre-merger Delta ATL-VIE got dropped around the same time as JFK-KBP.

No Jason, actually that is incorrect. ATL-IST went away at the time for two reasons.

1) It went away after 9/11, and never came back and;
2) It was flown with a MD-11, which in the restructuring after 9/11 meant that there was no a/c to replace it at the time as DL had played a game of chicken the year before with the pilots union which meant that DL's 777 fleet was stuck at just 7 air frames for the next 5 or 6 years. Considering the fact that most of the routes which Delta then used the 777's at that time were ultimately failures and those routes were either dropped or downgauged, one would have been better suited for ATL-IST, at least seasonally.

Also Jason, you seem to have timewarped this whole thing. This is NOT a chicken and egg thing: TK's big North American buildup started in 2010 (that is when JFK went 2x, and they started their multicity ramp up). Not before. Prior to 2010 They had a flight to JFK and a thrice weekly flight to ORD (they also had a 2 or 3x to Miami that failed).

So you want to know how they could have competed? OK. Here is how they could have competed. By 2003 they should have maintained daily service throughout the year, not cut it down to 5x per week, especially after the Air France terminal 2E accident that made connecting through CDG the worst nightmare in Europe. Travel had been picking up, but DL kept to this schedule. What this meant was that DL loyal fliers started to abandon Delta even if they did not want to out of necessity. Look, there was a time when I could fly this route any day of the year, and would generally know at least one or two other passengers upfront, that is how often I flew and how many other people regularly flew this route.

They should have brought back ATL-IST starting in 2005 or so.

They should have not reduced their entire IST staff, including sales and marketing staff from 2007 onwards.

From 2007 onward they should have done this rather than launch various services to garbage Eastern European markets such as Bucharest, Kiev and the like, markets where they had to start from scratch and ultimately failed.

From 2011 or so they should not have gotten rid of almost everyone else but a skeleton airport staff and entrusted everything else to the AFKL team in IST who themselves had eviscerated their staff and could not market their own way out of a paper bag in IST.

For that matter from what I understand it was DL who objected to TK entering Skyteam back in 2001 or so, so that would have bee a different ball game.

But that is neither here nor there.

BTW, its not like I am just thinking of this stuff. If one looks back at my FT DL threads over the years, one can see that I have been writing about these knuckleheaded moves for more than a decade, and it was not difficult to see what DL is/was doing.

Lastly, while I will admit that for various reasons TK fares have been extremely cheap the last month or so, keep something in mind, TK flights to JFK have a very high O/D component, even today and even with 3 flights a day, slightly higher than 50% which incidentally is something like the 2nd highest in TK's entire route system, and their load factors are high. There are A LOT of people flying from Turkey to the US, even before figuring other cities into the mix. If one looks as recently as last summer TK fares have always been high, not dumped on the market, especially from JFK, and there was a lot of demand. I can tell you that last summer, the last that DL was flying, fares were higher than ever before on both carriers throughout the summer, but then again, what do I know, I only flew it 6 times over 5 months, and paid for other people to fly the route another 4 or 5 times during that time period.