United this week announced four new flights over the Pacific as part of its winter 2025-2026 schedule plan, including three cities it hasn’t served in a long time… or ever (I’m looking at you Adelaide). The four new routes?
- Hong Kong – Bangkok 1x daily from October 26 on a B787-9
- Hong Kong – Ho Chi Minh City 1x daily from October 26 on a B787-9
- San Francisco – Manila adds a 2nd daily from October 25 on a B777-300ER
- San Francisco – Adelaide 3x weekly from December 11 on a B787-9
Yes, Adelaide is flashy and fascinating considering that it’s a smallish city on the southern coast of Australia. For the people of Adelaide this is huge news. I’m just wondering if United can stimulate enough traffic to make this work, but it feels like Christchuch… and idea worthy pursuing.
And Manila? A second daily 777-300ER?! That is so much capacity… and I have zero doubt this will work. Even better, when the downturn comes, all that VFR (visiting friends and relatives) traffic will keep coming. This is the closest in my mind to a slam dunk.
And then there are the two flights from Hong Kong to Bangkok and Ho Chi Minh City. This I had to sit with for awhile, but I may be coming around. Maybe.
When I heard this was happening, I was instantly transported back 20 years to my days working in Marketing Planning at United. See, early on in my tenure, we announced we would fly a B747 from Hong Kong to Ho Chi Minh City as a tag, and it seemed crazy. It was a big deal, and it fell on the Marketing Planning team to coordinate inaugural festivities. The best thing that happened to me workwise at United was… not being chosen to deal with that mess.
My coworker had to herd cats on this one. I remember that we were supporting a charity that was delivering wheelchairs to kids in Vietnam, and they had chosen David Hasselhoff to be the star to carry the torch for them on that first flight. I just remember this being a complete and total nightmare. But I digress.
That 747 took off from San Francisco on December 9 and after a stop in Hong Kong, arrived in Ho Chi Minh City on the evening of December 10. It would turn around the next morning and then fly back to San Francisco. There was another 747 that did the same thing but went to Singapore instead. The key to these flights was connecting traffic, of course. United was counting on people coming in from or through San Francisco as well as Chicago — the two regular gateways to Hong Kong before the Continental merger — connecting through to Ho Chi Minh City. This was a headscratcher.
Hong Kong flights were pretty consistently pushing loads of the mid- to high-80 percent range. That didn’t leave a ton of room to connect people on to Singapore and Ho Chi Minh City. You could try to fill that with local traffic, but United was going to have to put out a very low fare to even hope it could make a dent.
Incredibly, these flights lasted all the way until the end of summer 2011. I honestly have no idea how they made it that far. They came back in 2012 with Continental 737s. That lasted until the end of summer 2016 when Ho Chi Minh was gone for good. The Singapore flight actually went back to a widebody but it disappeared at the end of summer 2017. Now, with nonstops from San Francisco, that route wouldn’t make sense anyway.
So, let’s fast-forward to today. United had been serving Hong Kong from multiple gateways, but it is now back down to two in a post-pandemic, post-Russian airspace closure world: San Francisco and Los Angeles. SFO went to double daily in late 2023, which is when LAX gained its first nonstop. LAX doubled up from late 2024.
These four daily flights make for a rather efficient flight pattern. The daytime 787-9 from LAX spends 2 hours on the ground before coming back, and the daytime 777-300ER from SFO sits for 3 hours and 10 minutes. The evening 787-9 from LAX is on the ground for 2 hours and 25 minutes while the evening 777-200ER from SFO turns around after 3 hours and 45 minutes.
In other words, there is no room on this fleet to squeeze in a tag on to another city like in the old days. And that’s because this isn’t really the same thing as the old days at all. This is a different plan where a 787 will be dedicated to flying these routes. That’s right, this isn’t a tag.
Those evening departures from the West Coast to Hong Kong will arrive in the morning, and a 787-9 will be waiting to take people off those two flights into Bangkok. Then it will turn around in time to connect back to the late evening flights to the US.
After the 787 gets back from Bangkok, it will pick up passengers off the daytime flights from the West Coast and fly them to Ho Chi Minh City. It will spend the night there and then fly back in the morning in time to connect people to the early returns to the US.
You know what? Let me put this in an image that makes more sense.
So, United is using a single 787 to add both Bangkok and Ho Chi Minh City to the network. (Of course the airplane will eventually have to route back into the system for maintenance, but in general, think of this as one dedicated airplane.)
This sounds insane, right? Why not fly nonstop? After all, these airplanes can technically fly these routes. From SFO, both Bangkok and Ho Chi Minh City are shorter than Adelaide. But, even if it wanted to do that, United doesn’t have the airplanes. Eventually Boeing will deliver more airplanes, but for now it would need 4 airplanes to fly roundtrip to both cities from San Francisco. This new plan requires just 1.
Of course, just because you don’t have the airplanes to fly nonstop shouldn’t mean you should fly with a stop in Hong Kong without something better to back up this plan. Here’s why United probably thinks this will work better than it did before.
First, take a look at this chart showing capacity and load factor in the Hong Kong market for United (including Continental before the merger) over time:
Data via Cirium
In the last year, United has significantly increased its capacity in Hong Kong, and load factor has fallen off. There is room to take more traffic on those airplanes. But this is not two flights coming in and connect to two flights going beyond in Southeast Asia like before. Instead, United will have two flights feed one connector beyond. So there are more seats feeding into the connection and there are more empty seats with the increased capacity.
Ok, but why not fly them from Tokyo? United is building up its hub there with those new flights to Cebu, Kaoshiung, and Ulaanbataar, but it can’t do these. Joint venture partner ANA already flies to both Ho Chi Minh City and Bangkok. United couldn’t do that without truly angering ANA. Besides, those are longer flights that can’t be done with a single shell anyway.
Hong Kong is in this sweet spot. A single 787 can connect perfectly to and from the four flights over the Pacific. And those four flights over the Pacific just happen to be split into two banks with the same cities served. It makes this an easy set-up.
Does this mean it’s going to work? Oh man, I have no idea. This is definitely something different that we haven’t really seen tried before in this way. It’s creative for sure, and it has actual promise. But am I skeptical? Absolutely.
