Logan Airport Flights and Airlines Discussion

Big visitor got diverted from JFK to Logan tonight!

Mark Garfinkel ‏@pictureboston 28m ago
A Rare, HUGE visitor @BostonLogan tonight due to weather in NYC. @airfrance AF006 @Airbus 380. #Boston #ViveLaFrance

https://twitter.com/pictureboston/status/753772522269794304

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So... who wants to bet that QR and EK are going to see a huge boost in seats filled for the time being? At least for as long as the FAA has TK flights banned. But I'm also assuming most international travelers are well aware of world events and may want to avoid IST even if flights weren't banned.
 
stellarfun said:
Airbus stated today its slowing A380 production to one plane a month. Doesn't look like new orders are on the horizon, so I think once existing orders are delivered, production will end. If it wasn't for Emirates, production might never have started. In any event, three A380 gates at Logan is at least one too many.
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Figures.

For any domestic airline, the plane would probably put them in a financial slump. One has yet to get one of them.

The plane is too expensive to gas up, too expensive to fly, too expensive to maintain and too expensive for the passengers to fly in. Emirates has a ton of resources & finances. They can afford the plane.

Plus, the flying Godzilla seats up to about 500 or more passengers in a 3-class configuration. It would be hard for a domestic airline to be able to fill up all those seats on the plane, because they would have to try to get their money's worth to make the plane a success.

United once thought about buying some of them. Don't know if they still plan to. Anyone, to me, who plans to get it, I'd tend to think that their finances are in good shape. Otherwise the plane would prove to be a real money pit for them. :confused:
 
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The a380 makes sense for routes between large US cities and London. Maybe between large cities on the west coast and Asia. But this is a limited market that wouldn't require 20 airplanes for an airline to buy. Airlines don't want to purchase 5 airplanes of one type, the costs per plane for that would be too high.

Boston-London is the only route I could see being feasible for an A380. However since no legacy carrier has a hub in Boston I don't see it happening with US airlines. BA it may make sense.
 
It would be interesting to see how many of those one-stop itineraries from Boston are flown on Southwest.
 
stellarfun said:
It would be interesting to see how many of those one-stop itineraries from Boston are flown on Southwest.
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That's part of the answer, I'm sure.

The other is simply that connections are freakishly available and so make up a lot of the market, even though people don't like them. As people search for when they want to leave and when they want to get there, Boston is the kind where connnections will be highly convenient frequency-wise and also competitively priced.

Every hub in the US has frequent flights to Boston. Every hub in the US has frequent flights to LAX and LAS and others on the list.

Assume that people prefer nonstops something like 8:1 or 30:1 over 1-stops and non-stops. If the available 1-stops and nonstops end up being 8x or 30x as frequent as the nonstops, we'd expect the market to be 50-50 between nonstops and the others. And that's what we see.
 
I am not that surprised Orlando has so many one-stop tickets being bought. For such a large market, there's not a large level of service offered. I believe only JetBlue flies the route year round and daily. Doesn't Delta and Southwest only fly it seasonally?

Even though JetBlue is well entrenched here, there must be a large number of passengers, especially on the corporate side, who still are loyal to United, American and Delta.
 
^ I think what we are seeing is, as mass88 suggests, the effects of large focus city operations by American (& US Airways), Delta, and United, now reduced to near/mere-spoke type operation. And you still have a ton of business flyers who were used to being loyal to a specific airline (racking up miles, etc), who aren't necessarily just going to jump ship to JetBlue, and are sticking it out on AA, Delta, UA, etc to continue earning their miles/benefits even if it means a 1-stopper. Hey, when you're flying on someone else's time & $$, plus accruing personal benefits, weird things happen (that the airlines love).
 
Arlington said:
Assume that people prefer nonstops something like 8:1 or 30:1 over 1-stops and non-stops. If the available 1-stops and nonstops end up being 8x or 30x as frequent as the nonstops, we'd expect the market to be 50-50 between nonstops and the others. And that's what we see.
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This argument only holds assuming equal price between non-stop and one-stop. In reality one-stops are cheaper in the vast majority of cases, which attracts price sensitive travelers. I would guess the amount of one-stop flights is highly correlated with the amount of price sensitive travelers (as opposed to business travelers) on a given route.
 
FenwayResident said:
This argument only holds assuming equal price between non-stop and one-stop. In reality one-stops are cheaper in the vast majority of cases, which attracts price sensitive travelers. I would guess the amount of one-stop flights is highly correlated with the amount of price sensitive travelers (as opposed to business travelers) on a given route.
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I would agree about price sensitivity. I doubt there is a lot of business travel between Boston and Orlando.

I just looked at Orbitz one way BOS-MCO on August 11. Only non JetBlue non-stop is a Delta at 7 AM. JetBlue non-stops tend to be about $100 pricier than the cheapest one-stops. The 7 AM Delta non-stop was near the cheapest fare. For a family of four, and assuming the same price differential on the return leg, that's $800 in added cost for the non-stops.
 
FenwayResident said:
In reality one-stops are cheaper in the vast majority of cases, which attracts price sensitive travelers.
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Any data to back this up? It isn't quite as one-dimensional as that: the problem with a nonstop is that you CANNOT fill it with connections and so MUST fill it with locals. To fill it with locals, you can't afford to be underpriced by connections. Hence the rule is pretty much: always match your competitor's prices for the same trip pairs.

As a result, when a nonstop is introduced in a market that previously had only connections, average prices *fall* (the new nonstop underprices the average connecting fare). If the airlines relied on pure nonstop preference, this would not happen (the average fare on the nonstop could be as high as the connections were, but this does not happen) [A new nonstop represents added supply and added supply drives down prices]

Now, if JetBlue has sold out of its low-fare buckets, you may find that the only one with low fares is somebody in the eight-times-as-many-connections market, but just as easily the yield management will (should) raise prices on the connections (to maintain parity with JetBlue as it sells out) and instead have that connecting inventory chase higher-fare hub-captives or captive-connections.

*I'm going to ask for a special exception for Leisure-dominated markets, like BOS-MCO and BOS-LAS.
 
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Arlington said:
Any data to back this up? It isn't quite as one-dimensional as that: the problem with a nonstop is that you CANNOT fill it with connections and so MUST fill it with locals. To fill it with locals, you can't afford to be underpriced by connections. Hence the rule is pretty much: always match your competitor's prices for the same trip pairs.

As a result, when a nonstop is introduced in a market that previously had only connections, average prices *fall* (the new nonstop underprices the average connecting fare). If the airlines relied on pure nonstop preference, this would not happen (the average fare on the nonstop could be as high as the connections were, but this does not happen) [A new nonstop represents added supply and added supply drives down prices]

Now, if JetBlue has sold out of its low-fare buckets, you may find that the only one with low fares is somebody in the eight-times-as-many-connections market, but just as easily the yield management will (should) raise prices on the connections (to maintain parity with JetBlue as it sells out) and instead have that connecting inventory chase higher-fare hub-captives or captive-connections.

*I'm going to ask for a special exception for Leisure-dominated markets, like BOS-MCO and BOS-LAS.
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My original statement was coming from common knowledge, based on my personal half a million miles of flying and extensive conversations with other travelers. But in the spirit of a factual debate here's a USA Today article sourced by an industry professional.

Objectively, non-stop is more convenient than one-stop. I can't see anyone picking a layover instead of a non-stop flight given the same price, unless they wanted to spend some time in the layover city. This means that the demand for non-stop seats is higher. In a perfectly efficient market airlines would match this demand with increased non-stop flights, but unfortunately there are multiple restrictions (slots, pilots, aircraft) stopping them. Instead airlines allocate their resources to the routes with the most business travelers since they can consistently get a higher price from them (ie, business travelers are more price inelastic than leisure travelers). This means that city pairs with a higher percentage of leisure travelers will see a higher percentage of one-stop trips since it's not worth it for the airline to allocate resources to the city pair.
 
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Hmm. There's still more going on than just
  • price
  • preference for nonstops
  • Leisure mix

I'd list two things that I don't see clearly explained here so far
  • Does everyone have the same definition of 1-stop? (traditionally it meant "same plane making 1 intermediate stop) vs "connection" (dominated by single-connection trips, involving a change of planes at a hub)? I suspect the OAG would tend to be old-school in specifying that 1-stop is same-plane.
  • Have these sources considered the relative abundance of connections (particularly NE-Fla and NE-Transcon), and relative abundance of 1-stops (Southwest mints a lot of true 1-stops, where other carriers may care to construct them only for otherwise illegal trips like LAX-LGA or SAT/AUS-DCA/LGA
[If the OAG is talking old-school, same plane 1-stops the 1-stop column would basically be "Southwest Market Share" since Southwest is really the only carrier these days who constrains its aircraft rotations to produce useful one stops, where hub carriers tend to have planes ping-pong hub-spoke-hub since nobody rides their planes for more than 1 leg except for beyond-perimter 1-stops to LGA and DCA]

The relative size/availability of connections vs the nonstops is still a big factor why connections would do well in a market like Boston, where Connections would do well simply because they're possible many times per hour in the markets listed below.

The definition of "one stop" is important (and often not clarified) because real, same plane 1-stops only lose to nonstops by 8:1 while change-of-plane connections lose to nonstops by more like 40:1 (when price is equal)

That there's always a Connection *somewhere* that's undersold (and the USA Today article is really about connections, not same-plane 1-stops).
  • If 1-stops means "no plane change" then the USA Today article [on connections] is near-irrelevant.
  • If 1-stops means "either same or different plane" then the simply-enormous number of competing connecting supply (that Boston sits to the east of every USA hub, and to the north of every Eastern US hub) will be a very important reason why "1 stops" do so well--there's just so much supply

The "connecting supply" explanation is also a good one for SEA-MCO (in addition to being very "leisure" you also have to overfly every hub in the USA to get there). Meanwhile that BOS-SFO or BOS-LAX is a busy 1-stop isn't quite as impressive when you see how nonstops really are winning that one by as much as they "should".
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^I'm more and more convinced that this table is "true" 1-stops (a two-leg, same-plane trip) and that Southwest would be the dominant provider of true 1-stops in every pair listed above, except LAX-LGA, which no carrier can legally offer as a nonstop.
 
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Looking at flights on Southwest from Boston to Orlando on August 11.

Ten flights, all are one-stop, all with a change of planes. The plane change for one of the one-stops is Dallas, two other connections change at Midway.

The cheapest Southwest flight is about $20 more expensive than the cheapest one stops offered by various carriers, and the Delta non-stop.
 
FenwayResident said:
My original statement was coming from common knowledge, based on my personal half a million miles of flying and extensive conversations with other travelers. But in the spirit of a factual debate here's a USA Today article sourced by an industry professional.

Objectively, non-stop is more convenient than one-stop. I can't see anyone picking a layover instead of a non-stop flight given the same price, unless they wanted to spend some time in the layover city. This means that the demand for non-stop seats is higher. In a perfectly efficient market airlines would match this demand with increased non-stop flights, but unfortunately there are multiple restrictions (slots, pilots, aircraft) stopping them. Instead airlines allocate their resources to the routes with the most business travelers since they can consistently get a higher price from them (ie, business travelers are more price inelastic than leisure travelers). This means that city pairs with a higher percentage of leisure travelers will see a higher percentage of one-stop trips since it's not worth it for the airline to allocate resources to the city pair.
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I'll throw in my 3 million miles of business travel experience.

Non-stops are virtually always more expensive, often significantly so, than a one-stop connection on any route without significant multi-carrier non-stop competition (the one flight on Delta for BOS-MCO is not significant competition to JetBlue, because schedule options also matter). Business travelers tend to fill the available non-stops because to them time is money. Leisure travelers tend to fill the connections (along with some cost sensitive or lower echelon business travelers with crappy corporate travel policies).
 
The interactive terminal map for Logan suggests that the C to E post-security connector is fully open. Three E gates off the connector, E1A, E!B, and E2.
 
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