DELee

True, but UA had upwards of 30% and has kept cutting back its flights and ultimately its dominant position by pushing more traffic through SFO instead of LAX both domestically and internationally and cutting the route network from LAX.

David

EWR764

chrisl137

Looks like that's about right - I couldn't find market share vs. time data with a quick search, but did find some analysis of their number of seats out of LAX dropping by about 25% from 2006 to 2016.

jsloan

Anybody can become the market share leader if they're willing to lose enough money to do it.

xliioper

DTW has gone from about 64% RJ flights 5 years ago to around 56% this summer. While still the majority of flights, I wouldn't simply write it of as an "RJ" hub. Biggest change has been in the number of 50-seater RJ's. From 172 CR2/37 ER4 daily flights 5 years ago, to 86 CR2 daily flights this summer. Many upgrades from 50-seaters to larger RJ's and from larger RJ's to mainline. They walled-off 16 RJ gates at the end of concourse C due to all the 50-seat reductions.

WineCountryUA

Must have been a long, long time ago
Per https://www.lawa.org/en/lawa-investo...are-statistics UA pre-merger plus CO pre-merge was about 17-18% in 2010 and held that into 2014 and a slow decline (as DL increased to bit more than UA) to today's numbers (LAX appear to roll the express carriers into the marketing carrier)

DELee

Did a quick search but IIRC, UA had numbers of over 25% around the 2000-ish era. jsloan may be correct that pmUA wasn't terribly healthy financially but their O&D flight options were certainly superior for those who were travelling out and in of LAX.

Now, not so much.

David

ContinentalFan

Excellent; thanks for the update. I am one of those that hopes United greatly expands its domestic and international network at LAX.

uastarflyer

JimInOhio

No airline is going to try to make someone else's hub a new focus city. Scratch SLC and DTW off the list. They aren't likely to make a focus city out of a mid-size market where someone else has much better market share already. Scratch CVG (DL), MEM (DL), and PIT (AA) off the list. There probably isn't a good candidate in the southeast as DL and AA have far higher market shares there.

The only airlines that are working on focus cities are F9 (primarily) and NS and they're doing it with price, not with building loyalties. To a lesser extent, DL. Southwest of course does it's own thing and well. UA's narrow focus on building international traffic and the feeds for that have probably caused them to miss any opportunities to expand much in domestic markets other than their hubs. That said, I'm told they are adding a few more flights out of CLE to Florida. They can do that there as they still have the largest market share.

beachmouse

The argument against Florida is that the O&D traffic is leisure-heavy and the LCCs make the competition based on price to be pretty brutal. And central Florida is out of the way for pretty much any domestic connection you can come up with. So to really make a go of it with big presence, you're talking big investment in an attempt to create an alternative to Miami in terms of domestic/international connections for Latin American and Caribbean routes, and that comes at a risk level that would likely cause a lot of discomfort among investors.

The best strategy in the state at this point is probably nibbling along the edges and trying to find a few routes that are underserved rather than a huge expansion attempt.