United Airlines has just announced some shocking new destinations. While Southeast Asia is still in the pipeline we didn’t get Bangkok or Ho Chi Minh City, instead we got several I would not have guessed.
- Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia
- Kaohsiung, Taiwan
- Nuuk, Greenland
- Palermo, Italy
- Bilbao, Spain
- Madeira Island, Portugal
- Faro, Portugal
- Dakar, Senegal
No other U.S. airline serves Nuuk, Palermo, Bilbao, Madeira or Faro but United will do so from Newark. Dakar, Nice, and Venice will be served from Washington Dulles.
Ulaanbaatar (seasonal), Kaohsiung (year-round) and Palau will be served from Tokyo Narita, a continued return to the airline’s unique fifth freedom operations there. These shorter intra-Asia flights are unique but also lower cost and risk, providing connectivity for United services to and from the mainland U.S.
Greenland flights will be twice-weekly seasonal, and I will admit to never having been to the northernmost capital in the world. Certainly interesting! And it’s basically just the same distance as Chicago – San Francisco, so why not?
Not all of these are going to work! So surely they won’t all last. Maybe they’re trying too hard, taking too many chances with a large incoming fleet of planes. But they’re certainly playing an exciting game at United. It’s not small ball. In total United will serve more than 40 destinations across the Atlantic and 147 total international destinations.
So JonNYC was wrwrwrwrwrong?!?!? Shocking.
I wouldn’t characterize any of these routes as “Bets Big” as you do in your headline. Instead it’s more like United tries creative new routes that leverage its hub locations and fleet. If it finds demand at good fares, we can expect to see them stay and see more like that. If not, they won’t be back next year (so if you want to go to Nuuk or Ulaanbaatar without big detours, this is the year!)
@Carl – Every airline will “leverage its hub locations and fleet”. These are big bets.
Some likely will stick, others not so much. The Europe stuff will likely do well and return. Mongolia and Greenland? Almost certainly not.
Greenland is next on the bucket list, always wanted to go but the travel time and cost (via Iceland or Copenhagen) was high. Delta will likely follow United’s lead (as usual).
The Summer of 2025 is looking up!
@lavanderialarry – I don’t fully disagree about Mongolia, but I feel like Greenland could be an easy money maker. There isn’t a ton of tourist infrastructure in Greenland (yet!) but I’d expect there would be enough group tours that they can fill a 737 twice-weekly for this.
@lavanderialarry
Greenland will be twice a week on a 737 seasonally.That’s not a big bet.
Mongolia is three times a week on a 737 seasonally
I have a feeling that Greenland is going to be overrun with tourists. I can’t imagine they have a sufficient number of hotels. And is there actually enough to do for 3-4 days?
@ Gary — Timmy is so jelly right now…And United will have wifi on the full flights, free from T-Mobile!
The UBN route has to only work for the fairly large expat Mongolian population in SFO. For prospective tourists, I can’t see how prioritizing UA would be better than routing, e.g., on TK through IST. For us non-west coasters, I can’t imagine loving UA so much that you’d go to NRT on UA then on to UBN when there are better airlines that fly to UBN in (reasonably) comparable time.
Tim Dunn will tell us why these are bad choices because he knows more than anyone else, especially the route planners at UA.
@Daniel I don’t see that United is risking much with any of these routes, so there’s not much to lose, hence I’m not calling it a big bet.
I have NO background at all in guessing “risks” or “bets” on those new UAL routes. I do have one opinion: I love, love, love, the addition of Palermo, Italy, to the route structure. Opening Sicily up a little more from this side of “the pond” is a wonderful thing, IMO!
…in case you wondered what kinds of things UA has in mind for those 50 A321XLR’s it has coming.
seasonal, less than daily service to a number of destinations using narrowbodies means that the aircraft and personnel will have to be redeployed somewhere else.
THAT is the bigger question. Filling planes anywhere in the world a few times per week during the summer is not a challenge.
Nuuk is meh.
The rest of Greenland is amazing, but it costs big $$ to fly domestically.
And the flights sell out months in advance.
And there are very few hotels (and no chains!)
But good job United for trying something new with all the routes – although anything that brings more American tourists to Europe sucks.
Take note that in spite of having a321 LR on order, some of these flights will be serviced with 737 and Max.
As for Tim’s observation about planes and crews, flights from Narita will come via their hub in Guam.
I just visited Nanortarlik and Qaqortoq last month on a Viking cruise ship. They were stops on the way from Bergen to Montreal, including a spectacular morning sailing through Greenland’s Prince Christian Sound starting at sunrise. These are small quaint towns, but fulfilled the goal of setting foot in Greenland. I would have liked to have gone to Nuuk, which is larger, but it’s a day’s voyage each direction. Qaqortoq did have a nice, modern-looking hilltop hotel though.
Palermo, Bilbao, and Madeira and Faro make are logical….. the others, not so much.
You should really do your homework. These are mostly migrant trafficking routes. These are cities that migrants go through to bypass visa restrictions. Instead of just relying on the Mexican border, .gov has gotten creative and has opened up new entry points.
Don’t worry, UAX will still be assisting “internal deportees” by flying migrants from Brownsville and McAllen via IAH… onward to places like Huntsville and Knoxville.
The spectrum kid discussing crew schedules is forgetting that all airlines sort through that same challenge everyday. It is a non-point point and oddly focused. United shocked the world in a good way and have said more is to come.
Jim,
the conversation clearly went over your head.
UA threw a couple planes worth of otherwise domestic capacity into international markets because domestic doesn’t need more capacity right now; Scott Kirby just joined DL’s execs last quarter (and DL today) in saying that domestic cuts are working.
UA STILL has to redeploy that capacity into the domestic system OR other international routes in the winter of 2025-26. It has nothing to do with crew scheduling but rather where UA Is going to dump capacity a year from now which is the worst time to add capacity to the domestic system.
strange how those that take pot shots at other people totally miss the gist of the conversation, isn’t it?
Currently, a lot of US supplying of Greenland gets sourced out of Copenhagen. Maybe some of that cargo and even staffing will go from EWR instead, but the UA Greenland route just seems to be an experiment for now and not a long-term commitment. Probably much the same for the UA Mongolia route from IAD.
Some people keep trying to say there are a lot of Mongolians in the DC area and that alone is enough for this route — I am not so sure that can keep the route afloat. While there are a fair number of Mongolians in the DC area, San Francisco, Chicago, Seattle and Denver have a sizable Mongolian community too. The DC area also has a sizable Uyghur community, but they would probably prefer to avoid China and nowadays have more connection with Kazakhstan than Mongolia.
Subtly, I think this is fanboy Patrick Quayle’s dream of making UA what PA was years ago – so many far-flung and exotic destinations you could travel to on their clippers.
As others have pointed out, whether or not the routes are profitable – that’s a different story. Back in the old days, airlines would frequently run routes with load factors of less than 50% – but some of the was related to regulation. Airlines can’t do that today – planes need to be full with paying passengers and very few, if any award seats.
For Quayle, his timing is great. UA has excess domestic capacity, and at least from NRT – UA has PA’s long-ago awarded fifth-freedom rights that these destinations can be aptly served by narrow body equipment.
Even if they cancel, it’s not as if UA is dropping LHR, CDG or FRA, these are small routes – and at least UA could say they “tried”.
Let’s not forget, this same Mr. Quayle while under Mr. Kirby at AA was the “prize winner” for adding 12 extra seats to their 737 fleet, aka “Oasis”. Of course, Mr. Kirby took this lad with him over to UA – a great protégé to continue “Kirby Kuts”.
Now, if we could only convince Sara Nelson, head of the AFA and her minions at UA to provide the excellent level of service that PA was known for in today’s version of Polaris on international routes…I know…dream…dream…dream.
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