Site Admin

Joined: 15 Jun 2005
Posts: 2316
Location: Indianapolis, IN

I have always felt that Cincinnati was a bad choice for a fortress hub for a legacy carrier. There is too much competition in surrounding cities to allow the airline to charge monopoly prices and the market is too small to provide enougy O/D traffic on the flights for the hub to be profitable. In a recent article in Yahoo News is appears that Delta may be moving away from the large operation in Cincinnati.

http://biz.yahoo.com/pz/050907/85393.html

Delta will reduce mainline and Delta Connection carrier capacity by 26 percent, while boosting the percentage of local traffic from 36 to nearly 50 percent

Don't mistake the part about boosting the percentage of local traffic to mean there is an increase in flights to accomodate those needs. There will be far fewer seats going out of CVG. The difference is that of the seats that do go out more will be filled with local passengers.

I think however that may be wishful thinking on the part of Delta unless they adjust their pricing to be competitive with airports like CMH and IND.

Member

Joined: 27 Jun 2005
Posts: 333
Location: St. Louis, MO

Cincinnati is too much of a money maker for them. It's just a matter of eliminating over capacity in their spoke routes jointly served by Cincinnati and Atlanta.

I personally think it's a dumb mistake and they should be routing more traffic through Cincinnati than Atlanta, for the sake of convenience purposes for their passengers. But that's just me.

Their move from Moline from service to Cincinnati into Atlanta shows they're more in Atlanta to start handing it back at AirTran in any way they can.

Site Admin

Joined: 15 Jun 2005
Posts: 2316
Location: Indianapolis, IN

Here is a little more specific information on total flight numbers.

"Delta will reduce its 128 flights Cincinnati flights to 94, and Delta Connection flights will be cut from 471 to 348. Most of the cuts are early-morning and late-night flights."

Source: http://www.indystar.com/apps/p...SINESS/509080401/1003/BUSINESS