Game On! United Adds 120+ Flights for College Football Fans
 

Much like years past, UA is adding non stop flights for select CFB games.
https://www.united.com/en/us/newsroo...road-this-fall
Previous years:
https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/unit...ball-fans.html
https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/unit...ball-fans.html

The whole proposition is a little odd . . . they're adding a flight, probably about 150 seats on some 737 variant, for games in stadiums that hold 80-100k people.

I would pass on the lowest fare in Q and U class lol

Most of the home fans would already live nearby. Away fan ticket allotments are usually <5k seats, max.

I see it as a way to generate revenue on incremental routes that usually have no demand and where people would be willing to pay extra to not connect in in an out of the way hub. Clemson @ ND strikes me as a great example. Avoiding ORD and the drive down to South Bend would be very attractive, I would think.

Ah, the small stadia. (Go Blue!)

Definitely not true. I'd say 90% of fans live hundreds of miles or more away from their team's home city.

What I find interesting is that they're point-to-point, not just capacity increases on hub-to-spoke flights. That's only capturing the local fans / students going to the games, as alumni are likely coming from all over and would benefit from added hub-to-spoke capacity.

Given what I've seen people pay for flights to college football games, it seems like a good business bet to add those flights, honestly, even with that oddity. The fact that most (all?) are to/from the nearest airports with commercial service and not like some of the UA "national parks" flights is even better; I always hated spending hours flying, then hours more in the car after the flight when traveling to games (and unlike friends, I usually paid a premium to go to, say, LNK instead of OMA for a game at Nebraska).

I hadn't followed the link, but now I see that. Based on that, it's clear to me that these flights are insignificant and are only being flown for PR value.

Some of these make a lot of sense and allow travelers to skip a hub of fly to a city that may not have regular service. Others, though, seem quite odd...check this one out. Stanford is about equidistant to SFO and SJC, and there is already good frequency on the SFO-SEA flights...where you presumably could just add another flight or upguage?

https://cimg9.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.fly...e7479e5394.png

I'm sure this flight is targeted at the Stanford fans who live in Silicon Valley, not those who live on campus.

Most; the nearest airport to Washington State is PUW (Pullman, WA / Moscow, ID); the nearest airport with UA service is LWS (Lewiston, ID). But GEG (Spokane, WA) is much larger.

I'd really like to see flights to places like YIP, but I don't think that's happening. :D

Since the topic of the thread is flights to attend football games, I'm talking about fans as people who would attend a football game, not alumni. And even 90% of alumni dispersing hundreds of miles away is a stretch outside of schools in dumpy little towns in the middle of nowhere. On top of that, these flights are all coming from the visiting team's home town. I'm sure their are Wisconsin fans in Western Washington, but probably not many. The one thing I can guarantee you about that GEG to MSN flight is that they could jam the cargo hold full of lite beer and fireball and those Wazoo fans would still drink that plane dry.

The majority of the fans at most college football games who either have season tickets or purchase single game tickets to support the home team are local. 90% of the home fans at any given game did not travel hundreds of miles to attend. South Bend is under 100 miles from Chicago, Portland is about the same distance from Eugene as is College Station from Houston. Your average USC or UCLA fan probably feels like they are travelling hundreds of miles because of the traffic. People do travel, but the majority drive less than 3 hours to attend. I say all this as someone who averages 8 college football games for the past 20 years, lives 20 miles from the stadium and tailgates with a parking lot full of people who all traveled less than 100 miles to the game except the 10% or less who traveled in for the game.

The real oddity is that Stanford fans have never travelled in great numbers!

UA can't solve their ongoing pilot and staffing issues. And now they're luring CFB fans to be added their on-going current travel mess? 🥱🥱
What a mixed message

After the end of August, the schedule slims down considerably. Adding two or four extra flights per weekend isn't going to contribute in any meaningful way to operational issues.

Not too odd of a proposition if you consider UA is doing it to make money, rather than as some sort of fan service.

It only serves a fraction of the fans at the game, but looking at the routes, I bet UA will have no problem selling out 150 seats for a nonstop flight between city pairs that wouldn't otherwise have nonstop service.