Need alternative hubs
 

The mess at Atlanta 10’s of thousand stranded need more hubs in this situation would have been nice to keep CVG and MEM.

Virtual networks.
look it up - MIT Masters thesis
Gil West loved it

AMEN! I have been posting/complaining about this forever.......you dehub CVG, MEM, DFW, MCO........and route everyone through ATL this is what you get. Have the master thread that I will put further of my view on this but you totally hit the mark!

when it works as designed/intended, it’s great

when there’s an unexpected disruption, its resilience (ability to use alternative paths/hubs to offload some of the traffic) and recovery are far less so

Delta has about eight hubs. Not everything goes through Atlanta even though it is by far Delta's largest hub. Every hub has issues at some time of year such as ice and snow at their northern hubs and horrible summer weather at ATL.

CVG seems somewhat redundant, but making MEM a minihub (again) could take some of the pressure off of ATL. OTOH, MCO has lots of flights and probably should be recognized as a hub with lots of legal connections during IROPs. I don't see DFW re-emerging as a DL hub.

it's too late to re-hub MEM. The airport has been pretty significantly reconfigured and most of the gates NWA originally occupied have been assigned to other airlines, demolished or mothballed.

This and MEM can't really support being a focus city or hub with O&D paying the premium of nonstops. The city has really declined over the past 20-40 years. Depending on how you look at the numbers, the population has either remained flat or had a 15% decline since 2020 versus a ~20+% increase in Nashville and 20-30% in Atlanta.

The other thing armchair CEOs also forget is you can't just shunt flights and crews from one hub to another. EIther a hub offers a full compliment of flights and destinations or it does not. Having a few flights from AAA-BBB doens't help when there are literally hundreds of thousands of people who are misplaced in the network.

A hub serves to accumulate benefits from centralizing a lot of flights in one place. By definition, adding more tempers those benefits.

So adding more hubs would reduce benefits for the 99.7% of the time that the airport isn't experiencing a crisis.

I would imagine that many smart people and many powerful computers have been involved in configuring the Delta route network the way it is. If an alternative would be smarter, then it would probably emerge.

I'm not an expert on the topic, but it seems to me that if an airline has too many hubs, then the advantages of a hub-and-spoke system begin to evaporate. And, if you do run into irregular operations at a smaller hub, it will probably entail fewer options for you to get where you are going . . . because instead of 6 or 7 or 8 flights a day from that hub to some random spoke city, maybe there are only 1 or 2 or 3 flights a day.

It does seem like Austin is on the path to becoming a small hub, according to an interview this past week with Paul Baldoni, Delta’s SVP of Network Planning. He said once it gets to 120 daily departures, which they plan for, they’d consider it in hub territory “whether they call it that or not.”

I’m no expert, and I could be wrong, but I don’t think it would provide much relief in this situation given Atlanta’s scale. That being said, for those saying Delta needs more hubs, it seems like one is in the works.

things happen. Historically Atlanta fares better than northern hubs.

Highly doubt we see a full blown MCO “hub” again or anything close to that, however it would not shock me if we see some more small p2p DL buildup in MCO. It’s been rumored UA is looking at a new Southeast hub and MCO has always been a target for that considering the existing UA bases and maintenance facilities. If UA starts getting more serious about MCO, it’s possible DL could do a small buildup similar to AA in AUS around 2020/2021 to put more pressure on UA. ATL-MCO is the busiest DL route from ATL and there’s not room to add more frequency as it’s already hourly from 7am-11pm.

Most of the legacy MEM hub terminal facilities were torn down during the MEM terminal modernization and the Memphis metro area is in decline as a whole, so I doubt we see anything new from DL there. DL isn’t even the largest legacy carrier at MEM anymore and was surpassed by AA.

I think AA has more flights but DL carries more passengers (DL has more mainline)

I don't think DL needs more hubs but I do think they need to better balance their core hubs of ATL/SLC/MSP/DTW. There is simply too much being pushed through ATL and the other interior hubs remain underutilized. Having so many eggs in the ATL basket is risky and eventually backfires on them from time to time...yet it could be worse. Imagine if ATL had a major tornado, flood, or earthquake event that would take months/years to recover from. DL would be in a world of hurt due to how much it relies on ALT dominating its whole network. Of the Big 3, DL has the least balanced hub system.

Whilst I don't feel DL necessarily needs another hub perse, I do think it's smart for them to develop AUS as a focus city.