Yesterday I shared 7 things United Airlines shared during the morning session fo their Media Day on Friday.
Here are 5 things the airline shared during the afternoon.
- United will run Newark – Washington National as a shuttle.
- In the summer of 2020 they’ll have 550 peak day departures from Denver.
- They’ll run a 6th Newark – London Heathrow flight this summer. Whenever a new Heathrow flight comes online the natural question is where did the slot come from to allow it? It turns out they’re borrowing the slot from their revenue-sharing joint venture partner Lufthansa.
- According to airline President Scott Kirby, United wants a joint venture in Latin America covering Avianca, Copa, and Azul. It doesn’t sound like he thinks American will be able to wrestle a partnership with Copa away from United. Kirby wouldn’t comment on whether $2 billion was a lot for Delta to pay for a 20% stake in LATAM.
- Kirby said that future flying and investment in a Hong Kong Polaris lounge will depend on demand, though Oscar Munoz added that “demand prior to the current revolt is there.” What happens on the ground will determine United’s service levels.
United has become so full of itself. It was 2016 that they “introduced” Polaris. And yet so many routes are still flying old aircrafts. For example, ORD to PVG still has the horrendous 2-4-2 business class seats. They’ve made so many of us wait for the new, proper business class seats yet now they’re pushing so many 1K members (like me) out with their new spending requirements ($18,000 to qualify for 1K status). Here comes another monopolistic market.
Adios, United
Newark to/from Washington National as a shuttle? It’s a good idea, but I will believe it when I see it. Simply calling it a shuttle doesn’t make it a shuttle. First, they need to add more total flights to each day’s schedule. How about one every 90 minutes? Second, they need to make this flight a priority even when air traffic control tells the airlines to reduce flights in/out of NYC airports. Currently the flights flown by regional jets (such as this one) are the ones that get cancelled in those situations. Third, they need to always have spare aircraft on hand to handle the overflow.
I used to fly the Eastern Shuttle back in the day, and that’s my benchmark for shuttles. Eastern did many things wrong in their final decade of existence, but they were the gold standard for shuttles.
By the way, if United is serious about this EWR-DCA shuttle concept, they should implement it very quickly so they can take advantage of the construction mess over at LGA and lure passengers away from the LGA-DCA shuttle flights operated by American and Delta. Perhaps some of those passengers will stay with United even after the construction project finally ends.
The other questions about slots is when an airline says their adding DCA service, where is it coming from?
@Charlie – not sure you actually fly out of NYC…EWR on a good day is still a far inferior experience than LGA, especially if these “shuttle” flights will fly out of EWR-A.