jsloan

Orlando and Tampa are even more out of the way than Jacksonville would be.

With either of those two cities, you can get O&D travel only -- local residents, tourists, and convention traffic. There's virtually no domestic connecting traffic at all.

Explorer789

Nashville or Charlotte are other options as they are bit more inland. Both are just south enough to reroute pax during winter snow storm disruptions at ORD.

prestonh

It's been tried and obviously didn't work, the yields are not great which is why there is such a large LCC presence:

United Airlines Takes Off With Its New Orlando Hub - tribunedigital-orlandosentinel

jsloan

BNA Is a WN hub and CLT is an AA hub. Neither seems large enough to be a two-airline hub to me...

steveo

Lets make things interesting. San Juan Puerto Rico.
What they can do is make it into a bad ... hub catching traffic to South America, Europe, and Africa.
Now the way they make money however is to take advantage of how people from South America and Africa love buying american goods / electronics / other crap. So we set up a huge mall next to the airport, and shuffle in passengers to get all their shopping down before heading back to Lagos or Salvador. To Scott Kirby, I like being paid in Cash. Your welcome

Melodsal

rmadisonwi

I think the question is also one of hub vs. focus city. To me, a focus city is one where the airline runs a limited number of nonstop flights to cities where that particular market may have higher demand than can be easily accommodated with simple, direct connections via existing hubs. Some connection opportunities may be offered via the focus city, but that's more incidental (and, in reality, there would be virtually no connection opportunity that would only exist via a focus city and not via a regular hub, and for various reasons, it's much easier to route connections through larger hubs).

A hub, on the other hand, is one that has strong local demand and is also a good connection point for reasonably direct one-stop flights. The problem with finding a city for a new hub is that there aren't really any cities left that fit the definition of offering reasonably direct one-stop connections that can't already be accommodated by existing hubs.

That's why cities like BOS, SAN, JAX, etc. aren't hubs. They don't really offer connections that can't already be offered elsewhere. They are in a terrible location for domestic connections, and the international connections are already covered via other hubs. So, that leaves them to just being possible focus cities with service to places that might be able to sustain a flight or two based on O&D traffic. This is where a 100- to 120-seat jet would help UA, if they had one.

afCAMEO

Hear, hear

RooseveltL

UA purpose for a hub would include *A partners. Most of their partners are flying to Europe and the best placement is EWR or IAD - which covers mid-Atlantic and NorthEast. ORD covers mid-west.
FL airports make no sense as not many *A partners terminate (unless seasonal) and the seasonal snowbird traffic is 1-2 trips per year. May fill a plane in Sept/Oct/Nov or Mar but rest of the year nothing. Domestic - FL markets have too much competition from LCC which passengers could care zero about *A or UA vs. cheapest airfare to get their family of 5 to the beach. Finally, FL markets with longer and more volatile storm seasons (Aug-Nov) would add more gambling as UA has enough challenges with ORD & EWR with storms/weather.
No other market in the US is underrepresented for business travelers (the majority of $$$ for the legacy). ATL already has LCC & Delta, Charlotte is US and no other place in the SouthEast would truly fit its network properly. Just my opinion - PIT & CLE were both tried as aux. hubs but no logical person not residing in those areas would wish to connect and potentially get abandon.
Unless the Latin America/South America market explodes or low the alliance of COPA - I couldn't justify anything else IAH can't handle. IAH also is within 2 hrs of most of the South East so parallel ORD as just in the middle for longer connections from the smaller feeder airports.
In the end - unless you want UA to compete against Jetblue, SouthWest, Spirit, Frontier, Alaska (which UA will lose) - they will concentrate on their business routes/client and longer distance markets which might be difficult landing/taking off a 787 from New Orleans airport or Tampa regularly at 50% capacity.

manstein58

HNLbasedFlyer

I think UA could have made a lot of money making HNL a hub - there is simply no competition interisland and residents have no choice on those flights except to fly Hawaiian. Hawaiian also has an awful FF program.

They are already the dominant carrier in Hawaii/Mainland flights and they should've seized even more market share.

UA_Flyer

My selfish lobby is for South Florida, particularly for FLL for more flights to hub cities and transcon flights to both SFO and LAX.

Howerver, before any new frontiers are been planned, UA should seriously look at how/what it wants to do for IAD in the long term. You cannnot run hub using such a lousy airport facility. The C/D temporary concourses cannot be tempoeary forever and it will need be replaced when the whole structure will eventually give away. (Not a civil engineer to comment intelligently)

Next would be making LAX a true hub. I feel LAX has been downsized to a focal city in the past decade. Having a nice UC and a Polaris Lounge don’t necessary mean it is a hub.

EricH

Reading through this thread brings to mind a proposal from some years ago for a pure hub airport to be built somewhere in southern Illinois (I think). The airport would be in the middle of nowhere with no O&D traffic but with plenty of flat, relatively low-cost land it could be built with plenty of runways and a terminal designed purely for facilitating connections. Obviously, it was never built (and I didn't think much of the idea), but something like this might reemerge since most of the non-hub cities seem to have critical shortcomings (poor location, inability to provide an airport of sufficient scale).

Miles Ahead

Peotone, IL. Population 4142. Go Blue Devils!

It's 43 miles from ORD, and the intent would be to, as you say, facilitate connections, and maybe capture a small part of originating traffic. It was never popular. In my opinion, any argument in favor of it applies more strongly for IND, which has a lot more infrastructure already there.

mccullo3