Yesterday I talked about how American is trying to improve its DFW hub by adding more block time (longer flight durations) and going from a nine to 13-bank hub structure. This is likely to mean longer trip durations for travelers, so… will they go for it? Before we get into that, let’s look at what this really means in practice. It’s time for a deep dive.
I picked a random route with frequent connections at Dallas/Fort Worth: New Orleans to Albuquerque. Both cities had 8x daily flights to DFW last year, and both have 8x daily in the new structure, so it makes for a good comparison. It’s important to remember that 13 banks doesn’t mean a ton of flights are added. They are just spread out more.
I did the math on the shortest possible connection to Albuquerque off each of the eight inbound flights to DFW from New Orleans. The result?
Data via Cirium
Overall, the flights take more time, the layover is longer, and that means the overall duration stretches further. Of course, this varies by specific trip. These are averages after all.
For example, the first flight of the day from New Orleans now goes 25 minutes later at the still insanely early 5:49am. The layover is shorter, so travelers will actually get into Albuquerque only six minutes later. But there are other flights that are impacted more than enough to offset that gain here.
With the stage set, now the question becomes whether this is going to be a problem for travelers or not. Will the airline not sell as many tickets or have to charge less to move seats? American is clearly betting that it will do just fine, and it’s worth it to improve the operation and create more airport capacity at DFW.
The real answer is we don’t know the impact, but there are tea leaves to be read here. Importantly, we can think about how flights are displayed differently on shopping sites than they used to be in the past. Let’s look at that New Orleans to Albuquerque trip on July 13. The first option Google Flights showed me was a United flight with a duration of 5h03m. The second choice is on American with a 4h41m duration, at the same price I should add. Then it’s Delta at 5h45m followed by Southwest at 4h10m. In other words, duration is not the key metric here. You can still sort by duration, but that sort is fifth down the list after whatever “Top Flights” is, price, departure time, and arrival time.
Even Expedia shows that same 5h03m flight first but in fifth place it explicably shows a United flight with 6h44m duration. It has a whole page vaguely explaining how it sorts things, but it’s a whole jumble of departure and arrival times, price, schedule, etc. It’s not as straightforward as it used to be.
None of this presumably takes into account paid placement either, something American could ramp up on at least some sites if it so chose. I was looking at another itinerary on Kayak that showed a truly bizarre two-stop itinerary first on Southwest. This one was double the duration of better flights, but hey, if you pay for it, you get preference. It’s a whole different world out there.
In short, trip display is more complicated now, so maybe American won’t take as great of a hit as it would have in the old world where display rankings were better understood. Or maybe not. American seems willing to take that chance, but it can’t know the answer here.
I’m sure all the other airlines are thrilled at the prospect that American will be the guinea pig for this one by going to this structure with more banks and flights being spread out. Sure, Delta has had its version of flying a million banks a day in Atlanta for a long time, but Delta has so many different banks that it makes connectivity much easier thanks to sheer volume. If this works for American, then others may look at optimizing their hubs as well. I imagine United would like to get more utilization out of those Chicago gates… something we will talk about later in a future post.
I realize this sounds even mildly rosy, but trust me, I’m skeptical as always. I don’t know that this is going to work as planned, and I honestly don’t know that even having this block time buffer will be enough for American to get its operational act together. But I sure like to see airlines trying to change things to see if they can get a better result. This will be a very useful test, and if it works, then airlines might all think about it. If not, American can always revert. But then again, it’s still digging out of the last hole it created when it crushed its sales team’s efforts. This at least seems less risky than that failed plan.
