Destinations lost since DL/NW merger
 

With Delta's announcement this week that it would be dropping service to BKK, it got me thinking about all of the destinations we've lost on Delta since the merger. I fly Delta because it's reliable and the service is good, but also because of all the places it can take me. So each destination lost makes that case just a little bit weaker. I'm just focusing on the international destinations here, but I'm sure an equally lengthy list could be made domestically.

ABV
ACA
AMM
BKK
BSB
OTP
BUD
PUS
CAI
DXB
IST
KBP
ROB
BOM
VLC

To be honest, I didn't realize how long this list would be until I started compiling it. It's actually pretty sad how many parts of the world are now out of reach. Anyone care to do it domestically?

A few on there make complete sense. CAI, BOM, AMM, IST. Some others, not so much. ACA, for example, WA served from LAX for years. Some - highly-questionable: DXB for example =-).

I'm glad I had the chance to go to OTP, VLC, KBP, IST, BKK, AMM while they lasted. All pretty cool places! Amman/Jordan and Petra are truly magical.

Was AMM inherited from PA?

Pretty sure it was not....it was started by DL on their own.

Delta launched JFK-AMM in 2008: http://www.travelagentcentral.com/fl...amman-new-york

Let's be straight about something here. Most of the routes that you reference lasted were test routes, Delta flew them for a year or two, or perhaps 2-3 seasons and dropped them if they did not perform. IST however is/was a route that they not only flew consistently since they got it from Pan Am. From 1991-1997 via FRA, since 1997 nonstop, and briefly at the turn of the century they also had a successful route ATL-IST as well (that went away after 9/11 and never came back). PAn Am had been flying the route since 1952 or so, so this is a route that essentially was intact for about 65 years, and that is a big difference than West African routes, or esoteric Eastern European routes that they played with for a short time. TK flying 14 times a day to the US, including ATL, sort of proves that there is demand between the countries. That being said, they might have pulled out after what has occurred over the last 6 weeks in IST, OTOH, the route lasted successfully through three prior coups and all sorts of other trouble over the years.

ABV
ACA
AMM
BKK
BSB
OTP
BUD
PUS
CAI
DXB
IST
KBP
ROB
BOM
VLC

I think they dropped CRP, LBB, and maybe BRO and another TX city after the merger.

Here's some Canadian destinations that came to mind. Might be more. This list could grow too if the current economic conditions persist.

YXU - London
YQR - Regina
YQT - Thunder Bay
YYG - Charlottetown

CAN was served by PMNW from NRT.

I think there are some other intraAsia routes that have been lost. I would guess Fukahama, Guam, Jakarta in addition to Pusan.

IIRC KIX is about to be lost too. Technically, the old Osaka airport should also be on the list.

Delta's still going to fly KIX-GUM and KIX-HNL, right?

You post this as if it's somehow a "problem" endemic to DL, without any seeming recognition that:

• no other US carrier flies to any but one of them (UA@BOM)
• most overfly major partner hubs, while lacking a significant business or high-yielding tourist component; which, barring subsidy, is generally going to be a losing proposal for a US carrier.
• others (e.g. IST and CAI) lost their flights due to internal strife and political upheaval.

In fact, I'd say that DXB is the only one where DL just couldn't compete, despite the market. As for the rest, at least they gave the markets a go.

SGN used to be served via NRT but without local pickup rights from Japan IIRC.

I actually did the same thing the other day, but did long-haul routes they dropped since the merger instead of just destinations and here's what I came up with:
(compiled mostly from old Sky magazines)
ACC - ABV
ACC - ROB
AMS - BOM
ATL - ACC
ATL - ATH
ATL - BOM
ATL - BSB
ATL - CPH
ATL - DKR
ATL - DXB
ATL - FOR - REC - ATL
ATL - ICN
ATL - KWI
ATL - MAN
ATL - MAO
ATL - PRG
ATL - PVG
ATL - SVO
ATL - TLV
DKR - CPT
DKR - JNB
DKR - LAD
DTW - HKG
DTW - HND
JFK - ABV
JFK - AMM
JFK - BOM
JFK - BUD
JFK - CAI
JFK - IST
JFK - KBP
JFK - NRT
JFK - TXL
KIX - GUM
LAX - GRU
LAX - LHR
MCO - BSB
MEM - AMS
NGO - GUM
NGO - MNL
NRT - BKK
NRT - HKG
NRT - ICN
NRT - PEK
SEA - HND
SFO - NRT

A ton of the routes everyone is posting were both started and ended after the merger, so to me they seem odd to be included in this thread. Is the point of the thread to not say where the combined entity cancelled destinations that were parts of the pre-merged airlines?

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.

I don't think too many people flying to IST on TK are going to/from Turkey. Rather, they are connecting somewhere, most likely India but possibly the middle east. Delta could not really compete with that, and the feed at their US hub (JFK or ATL) would not compensate.

OP here. What is the point indeed. Well, when I saw the elimination of BKK, it got me thinking about destinations no longer served. So I made a list. I picked the merger not to insinuate this was because of the merger, but because I needed a line in the sand, and that seemed like a good one.

Yes, all these destinations are served by partners, and that's all well and good. But as a Delta elite, I prefer to fly Delta.

It's not to say I'm packing bags and finding another airline. Not that I'm suggesting they fly to unprofitable destinations. Im not asking for a return to the days of airlines as charity cases. I'm just lamenting destinations lost, and starting a conversation.

Nwa used to fly msp-osl, nrt-pus and nrt-fuk.

I think they also tried Samoa and one other crazy destination from nrt during the hours when the 757's would have been otherwise sitting idle on the ground at nrt.

obviously
 

the vast majority of those people going USA - IST on Turkish are not just going to Istanbul - they're mostly going onward. That said, all of those seats that Turkish has added ARE available for sale for USA-IST (or other destinations). Putting that many seats into the market does have an impact on the price of those seats. Having all those extra seats going to Turkey, but not the demand to turkey, has an impact on the price of seats to Turkey in general. It has a downward impact on general USA-Turkey prices (way lower). And there's nothing that anybody can do to raise those prices. So, delta cannot do anything but match those prices. All was well and good back in the day when Turkish only flew 1x/day to JFK, maybe a daily flight to Miami, and a few days a week to Chicago. There were relatively few seats, and Delta represented a consistent way to get there - they could charge higher prices. Now they can't. There are way more seats in the market to Turkey Prices are lower. Yes, Turkish has to take those fares too. But they can also take (hopefully higher) higher yielding fares too onward to some obscure destinations but also to their whole network. Delta cannot do that. They're stuck taking the cheap USA- Turkey fares. And that doesn't work for Delta anymore. That's reality.

QUOTE=cbn42;27061760]I don't think too many people flying to IST on TK are going to/from Turkey. Rather, they are connecting somewhere, most likely India but possibly the middle east. Delta could not really compete with that, and the feed at their US hub (JFK or ATL) would not compensate.[/QUOTE]

Yes Jason, you can keep posting as if we were in a vacuum, and the last 15 years did not happen. DL has pulled the route and TK now has 14x a day to North America. We all know that.

However, what I have attempted to explain (and have been writing about for a decade), is why Delta lost this market, and it is not due to TK's buildup as that is fairly recent, and DL gave its marketshare away.

You have a point to places like LAX regarding the huge number of transfer passengers, where I doubt O/D is more than 20%, however IST-JFK has the second highest O/D load factor in their entire long haul system, over 50%. I am not making this up, you can see the numbers posted at CAPA. And again, I can tell you from personal experience that there have never been the fire sales that you say are there (other than the last month or so, due to the bombings and Coup attempt).

I have flown to Turkey three times for $450 RT or less in the past 5 years on SkyTeam. IST was THE mileage run destination before the switch to revenue based programs. The fire sales went on for years...and I am sure many in the forum would agree. I actually find current fares to IST to be on the high side.

how exactly
 

Did Delta just give the market share away? I don't agree with your analysis.

And as pgh alludes to, there HAVE been cheap fares to IST for years.

I've never paid more than $500 or $600 roundtrip from DC for at least the last 10 years.

How am I posting like we've been in a vacuum? I'm telling you what happened in the market.

Turkish has been expanding in North america for years, adding tons of seats while the market USA-Turkey hasn't grown accordingly. That dilutes fares. TK competes by selling beyond Turkey, while those going just to Turkey (DL, and UA for the brief season it was there) are left with the lower diluted fares only.

DL didnt do anything different in Turkey than it did in other markets such as Germany or Italy. Or any other European market. The big difference is that those markets didjtn have irrational carriers that added seats to a market that couldn't absorb them, that's all.

Delta did what it could it in Turkey, but was powerless to stop the massive/ irrational growth of Turkish, which is ultimately what did it in in the market.