The summer of 2022 was defined — and continues to be marked — by skyrocketing travel demand and record-breaking airline delays and cancellations. Airlines are often overbooked and understaffed, leaving millions of customers stranded.
To deal with the dilemma, airlines have decided to only fly routes that they can physically maintain — all while attempting to meet customer demand. Airlines planned hundreds of new routes and destinations, largely in the continental United States, in 2021 and 2022.
Southwest Airlines may have added one additional route to their itinerary in any given year prior to 2022. The airline announced more than three dozen in 2021-2022. Jet Blue has announced the addition of 29 additional routes. Delta had around two dozen. The airlines were attempting to react swiftly to the rapidly rising demand from passengers while also lacking the personnel to run the planes required to meet that demand.
The airlines then canceled practically all of them one by one. They plainly did not have the personnel to support the existing routes. This summer’s turmoil was the outcome.
These airlines are looking to international flights to help them stabilize their timetables.
If airline executives learnt anything during the epidemic, it was that visitors wanted to go to fresh and unfamiliar places with built-in social distance, rather than the usual suspects.
As we approach the fourth quarter of 2022, the main US airlines are focused on several of those long-distance overseas destinations.
Delta has announced new nonstop flights from Atlanta to Cape Town and Los Angeles to Tahiti.
American has announced new routes from New York to Doha, Qatar, and Seattle to Bangalore, India, for this year and next.
And United has increased its transatlantic flights from Newark to Nice, France; the Azores; Bergen, Norway; Palma de Mallorca and Tenerife, Spain; and Washington, D.C. to Amman, Jordan. As a result, United became the world’s biggest transatlantic airline, larger than British Airways, Lufthansa Group, and Delta combined, and United currently services 25% more destinations over the Atlantic than American and Delta combined. In addition, the airline expanded service between Chicago and Zurich and Milan, as well as Denver and Munich and Boston and London.
All of these airlines are shifting and repositioning their assets, as well as allocating greater capacity aircraft to operate certain routes. In many situations, the losers here are secondary US communities that are losing service.
What about flying travel? Delta, United, and American are giving lower rates on these new locations, as they do with each new route launch, particularly during the fourth quarter, when traffic is usually less. But what they’re actually doing is preparing for what they predict will be a record number of travelers crossing the Atlantic next summer.