United Continental integrates its new look at O’Hare – Chicago Tribune
In what is sadly Julie Johnsson’s last story for the Tribune, she looks at United’s Customer Day One changes.

In the Trenches: Rethinking Our Facebook Strategy – Intuit Small Business Blog
I’ve never been a big fan of Facebook, and now I’m rethinking how to use it for Cranky Concierge.

Airline mergers push art of numbering flights the way of the Concorde – CNN This Just In Blog
A fun look at how airlines assign flight numbers.

The Cost of Flying Out Of Memphis Is On The Rise – ABC 24 Memphis
The local station was interested in the future of Memphis after Delta’s latest round of cuts. I talked about it here.

The hub itself has settled in with three banks per day. Planes come into Memphis in the early morning and then go right back out. There’s also an early afternoon arrival that turns around. Lastly, there’s an evening operation. Nearly all of Delta’s operations in Memphis fit into those three banks.

I say “nearly” all, because Delta has more operations from Memphis to its other hubs. For example, there are 10 flights a day to Atlanta. Those flights, however, aren’t there to support the Memphis hub but rather to feed Memphis customers into the Atlanta hub. These operations aren’t impacted by the cuts so far, and they’re some of the few routes where you’ll see larger mainline airplanes in operation. Here are the destinations from Memphis to Delta hubs and focus cities.

The other area where you’ll see larger airplanes is to the sun markets. Florida, Phoenix, Vegas, etc. You know the deal there. Memphis, like other non-hub cities, can often support larger airplanes to these markets because there is enough traffic going back and forth. That’s why we see Delta mainline airplanes in Ft Lauderdale, Miami, Orlando, Tampa, and Vegas. There are a few cuts in these sun markets, but it’s really the smaller sun markets that are hurt most, like Panama City. For the most part, however, these aren’t seeing much of an impact.

Once you get beyond those two groupings, there are very few mainline airplanes at all. It’s mostly a regional jet operation to a mix of small and medium cities in the South and Midwest along with large cities around the country. The large cities are untouched in these cuts. These are generally other airline hubs that have enough traffic to warrant some flights to Memphis. I’m considering a city to be large if it’s in the top 25 Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSA) in the US from the 2000 census.

Once we get below that level, the cuts start becoming more fierce. I’m considering a mid-size city to be one between 25 and 100 on the MSA list. As you can see, none of these cities are going away, but some are losing frequency.

Then when we get to the small cities (anything below 100 on the MSA list), it’s a bloodbath. Not only are we seeing a slew of cities losing service entirely (this doesn’t even include Montgomery and Monroe which were discontinued before the summer), but many of the rest are taking hits in frequency. The small cities are in trouble here.

So why does this matter? Well, it’s a shot at the heart of how hubs work. The idea of a hub is to bring in traffic from a variety of cities, aggregate it in one place, and then put people on planes to other cities. So you might only have 1 person from Lafayette, LA wanting to go to Chicago, but when you combine that with the little numbers from Montgomery, Baton Rouge, Lubbock, Austin, etc, you get enough to fill that airplane. When you start taking away these small cities, it will inevitably make the other flights at the hub perform worse as well.

If Lafayette is gone, that’s one less person that will fly on that flight to Chicago. Maybe that’s the tipping point for making that Chicago flight unprofitable. You could try a smaller airplane, but most of these are already on pretty small jets. In the end, when you start whacking away at a hub like this, it generally hurts the chances of that hub sticking around.

This doesn’t mean it’s the wrong move. Smaller hubs simply don’t perform as well because there’s not enough of the higher-yielding local traffic in the market to make it work well. Delta really should be cutting back in Memphis if it can’t make money there.

Does this mean Delta will walk away from Memphis? Nah. We’ll still see flights to the other Delta hubs and sun destinations. It’s possible some of the large cities will keep service as well, but the way this looks right now, I’d be amazed if Memphis made it as a true hub in the long run.

It appears that my predictions were half right. Cincinnati is shrinking rapidly (including a recent cut of 24 daily flights), but Memphis is actually holding strong. Who would’ve guessed? Let’s look at some graphs.

Here you can see Cincinnati’s rapid decline. I looked at the number of daily departures on a random Wednesday during November for 2007, 2008, and 2009. During that time, the number of Delta/Northwest departures from the airport have been cut in half from 416 to 208. Mainline flights have dropped from 62 to 28, and now you’ll see mostly little 50 seaters buzzing around. Can it be much longer before the cuts continue? I think not.

Then we have Memphis. Check this one out.

Memphis has held strong. There are now only 203 flights compared to 221, but that’s a much smaller decrease than what Cincinnati has seen and it’s in line with the general capacity cuts we’ve seen around the system. It has lost a lot of mainline – 78 to 42 departures – but that is still a fairly large percentage of the total operation. Most importantly, Memphis has not seen a loss in the number of destinations served, so it’s really just a frequency reduction. Meanwhile, Cincinnati has seen the number of destinations served drop from 116 to 77. See for yourself.

So we see a mixed bag here, that’s for sure. Delta appears to be finding some level of success in Memphis while Cincinnati suffers from death by a thousand cuts.

[Updated 7/7 @ 1118a: Transposed Memphis departure numbers were fixed]