United loves a big summer announcement, and sometimes it doesn’t live up to the very high levels of hype. But this year? It not only lives up to the hype, but it exceeds it. United is putting its XLRs to good use, but it’s doing a whole lot more than that as it continues to try to push to find gold in new cities that others haven’t tried.
Overall, the airline will add 10 new cities, six of which aren’t served from anywhere in the US today. It will have a total of 14 new routes that touch five of its hubs, though most of them are at Newark. This also isn’t just about Transatlantic flying, with two of them heading over the Pacific. Enough of the numbers. Let’s go through these, starting with those Pacific routes.
United Leans Into the ANA Joint Venture
- Los Angeles – Osaka/Kansai 1x daily on a B787-9 year-round starting March 27
- San Francisco – Naha (Okinawa) 3x weekly on a B777-200ER from March 27 to October 28
I start with the Pacific routes, because I like these the most. First, there’s the LA to Osaka flight, but that one is straightforward. Osaka may be enormous with nearly 20 million people in the metro area, but the only flights from the US mainland are a single daily from SFO on United and one from LAX on Japan Airlines. And even those are only daily in summer; in winter they lose one or two weekly.
JAL’s presence in that LAX market must drive ANA crazy, but it either doesn’t have the aircraft to devote to the route or it just hasn’t found it worth doing on its own. So United will do it. Alone, I don’t love this, but with ANA as a joint venture partner, this is a good flight.
Then there’s Okinawa which will get 3x weekly during the summer. Again, the ANA joint venture will help to put people on this from the Japan side. But remember, the US military still has a very important strategic position in Okinawa, not to mention that California has a sizable Okinawan diaspora which will help boost the visiting friends and relatives (VFR) market. This is a creative flight that I think should do well.
The A321XLR Expands United’s Options
- Newark – Ibiza 4x weekly from May 31 to October 7
- Newark – Luxembourg 1x daily year-round from April 2
- Newark – Marseilles 1x daily from June 4 to October 29
- Newark – Valencia 3x weekly from June 2 to October 6
- Washington/Dulles – Toulouse 1x daily year-round from April 26
We’ve been hearing promises about how the A321XLR was going to open up all these new opportunities, but we haven’t really seen much yet. (It’s actually the A321LR that has been doing some fun, new flying at other airlines.) But now this is changing with the addition of five new routes that can’t be reached reliably with a B737 MAX, are probably too much of a gamble on an expensive B757, and are too small for a widebody.
It looks like United is starting off with nothing over 3,500 nautical miles; the Toulouse route is longest at 3,438nm. But that Toulouse route is also going to connect Airbus’s North American headquarters which is right near Dulles to its global management headquarters in Toulouse. I have to imagine that Airbus will do just about whatever is needed to make sure this route sticks around.
I put that flight in the same category as the Luxembourg run. The Grand Duchy of Luxembourg is a tiny country, but it’s a rich one. And the XLR is a premium-heavy aircraft. I expect all sorts of Dukes and Duchesses along with bankers and other executives to fill those flat beds. But uh… if you’re looking for an empty cabin in winter, look at the back of those airplanes. If the beds are full, that’s perfectly fine.
The other three are pure leisure routes for the summer, and not one of them is served from the US today. Sure, Air Transat flies to Marseilles and Valencia from Canada (on the A321LR, mostly), but there aren’t a lot of Americans doing that. This just dramatically improves connectivity from the US to places where people with money want to go.
Oh, and not mentioned yet, but if you want to try out that A321XLR, you can do it starting December 1 from Dulles to Amsterdam and Dublin. It’ll work existing routes until the big summer splash.
Blanket the Region With Leisure
- Newark – Catania 4x weekly on a premium-heavy B767-300ER from May 28 to September 20
- Newark – Ljubljana 4x weekly on a B767-400ER from May 12 to October 29
- Newark – Olbia 3x weekly on a premium-heavy B767-300ER from May 27 to September 21
- Newark – Terceira 3x weekly on a B737-8 MAX from June 9 to September 5
That photo is of a MUCH younger me in Ljubljana, Slovenia. And how did I get there? I went in and out of Venice and drove. Slovenia is a remarkable country with wine regions in the east, alpine lakes just outside the capital, beautiful glacial valleys in the west, and a small sliver touching the Adriatic Sea. It is an understatement to say it’s worth a visit, but it is a real pain to get there.
Sure, you can get through some other hubs, but even BA only flies seasonally to London. Ryanair isn’t there at all, and the flag carrier Adria failed in 2019. This is going to open up some real opportunity. Beyond that, United is starting to blanket the Adriatic with service to Dubrovnik and Split in addition to Venice, so travelers can start at one and end at the other. Ljubljana is a risk. That’s a big airplane, but it’s a risk that might just work out considering the other flights it runs in the region.
Olbia and Catania are in a similar vein. Fly into one, fly out of the other. (Just as long as you don’t fly Delta.) And Terceira complements the Ponta Delgada flight which is 100 miles away on a different island. The more presence you can have in a region, the better all the flights should do.
Connecting the Dots
- Denver – Paris/CDG 1x daily on a B787-9 year-round from May 27
- San Francisco – Tel Aviv 3x weekly on a B787-9 year-round from March 28
- Washington/Dulles – Milan/Malpensa 3x weekly on a B767-300ER year-round from May 28
And then there are these three. They aren’t nearly as exciting, so they don’t even get an image. But they do have real value in that they make it easier for United’s customers to get to these cities. SFO – Tel Aviv last flew in October 2023, abrubtly ending when Hamas kidnapped the Israelis to kick off the latest installment of a never-ending war. Now it returns. Paris and Milan have service from other hubs, but now the options grow bigger.
This is an ambitious plan for next summer. Of course it is not without risk, but that’s how it should be. If everything works, United isn’t trying hard enough. And that tells me that in the last few years… United hasn’t been trying hard enough. The only Transatlantic routes that failed in recent memory were Newark – Bergen and Tenerife, and those were from previous years. United did confirm that every route that flew last year will be back again this coming year.
With a success rate that high, I’d be pushing harder as well. Of course, the XLR opens up some new doors, but I figured we’d see more of those replacing B757s to start. That may very well happen — depending upon how many they get from Airbus before summer — but these first shells are about growth and building the network. This is all about building the network, and so far, the strategy is paying dividends.
