Logan Airport Flights and Airlines Discussion

mass88 said:
It'll be interesting to see where Jetblue deploys these planes to. We already know about London. Delta has built out a pretty solid European network from Boston. Amsterdam, Paris and London are all year round and at least daily. Seasonal service to Dublin, Lisbon and Edinburgh. It'll be interesting to see if they also do some further expansion - places like Milan, Brussels, Porto and even Athens could work for seasonal service.
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I've read that Basel wants a Boston flight bad.... problem is its not really a tourist destination.
 
JumboBuc said:
I suspect this is largely *Novartis* wanting a Boston-Basel flight.
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Probably. Without some sort of significant additional financial incentive, it's hard to see any airline launching Boston-Basel. It's an hour and 15 minutes from Zurich airport which has a direct flight to Boston on a top tier Star Alliance carrier (Swiss).
 
Lrfox said:
Probably. Without some sort of significant additional financial incentive, it's hard to see any airline launching Boston-Basel. It's an hour and 15 minutes from Zurich airport which has a direct flight to Boston on a top tier Star Alliance carrier (Swiss).
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But Boston isn't a particularly "Star Alliance" kind of town.

If Delta was flying BOS-ZRH then I'd say "game over" but Basel-Mulhouse-Freiburg might be right-sized for an A321 and, given its divided nationality (Swiss-French-German) the area might be not particularly wed to a European carrier (this is an area where the French Swiss and the German Swiss refuse on speaking to each other in anything except neutral English)
 
I would use a Boston to Basel flight. Now I need to fly to Zurich. Rarely I can connect in London and grab a Basel flight. In addition to Roche and Novartis in Basel there is a growing biotech community.
 
Arlington said:
But Boston isn't a particularly "Star Alliance" kind of town.

If Delta was flying BOS-ZRH then I'd say "game over" but Basel-Mulhouse-Freiburg might be right-sized for an A321 and, given its divided nationality (Swiss-French-German) the area might be not particularly wed to a European carrier (this is an area where the French Swiss and the German Swiss refuse on speaking to each other in anything except neutral English)
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What's interesting an nice about Boston is just how competitive the market is to Europe.

Star Alliance - Swiss International, Lufthansa, TAP Portugal, Turkish and Scandinavia Airlines all fly to Boston non-stop. SAS is seasonal. Austrian and LOT Polish are missing.

SkyTeam - Delta, KLM, Air France and Alitalia all fly to Boston year round. Aeroflot and Air Europa are missing.

OneWorld - British Airways and Iberia. Only Finnair is missing.

If we expand to include the entire globe.

Star Alliance - United, Swiss International, Lufthansa, TAP Portugal, Turkish, SAS, Air Canada and Copa.

SkyTeam - Delta, Air France, Alitalia, KLM and Koreanair.

OneWorld - American, British Airways, Iberia, Cathay Pacific, Qatar, LATAM and Japan Airlines.

I wonder if we will ever see one of the Star Alliance Asian carriers - All Nippon or Asiana, start service to Boston.
 
We also have AerLingus with a pretty great presence at Boston and Norwegian Airlines does some good cheap transatlantics. Flown each of them from Boston in the past 12 months because they have really competitive prices to Europe... Oh and Thomas Cook, not sure if they're still around Boston but they did competitive priced flights to Europe
 
mass88 said:
https://newsroom.lufthansagroup.com...munich/s/97d81814-5b9c-453a-8aa9-f24c623908a1

Lufthansa confirms that they will be sending he A380 on the Munich to Boston route starting for the summer 2020 season.
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Cool, I think this rumor has been swirling a bit. It'll be the 3rd airline with scheduled (seasonal) A380 service to BOS (Emirates and BA both fly them to BOS now).

HelloBostonHi said:
We also have AerLingus with a pretty great presence at Boston and Norwegian Airlines does some good cheap transatlantics. Flown each of them from Boston in the past 12 months because they have really competitive prices to Europe... Oh and Thomas Cook, not sure if they're still around Boston but they did competitive priced flights to Europe
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I've actually flown both in the last twelve months too for the same reason. Norwegian's Premium is one of the better values in the sky (less than standard economy on many airlines and a whole lot more comfortable).

Thomas Cook is gone though, I think. Virgin is doing the route on an A330 and it's not going well. For some reason, MAN-BOS is tricky. I could see Delta or Jetblue having success with a smaller plane.
 
Would a JetBlue Mint A321XLR have the range for Basel-Mulhouse?

And should their strategy focus on primary/hub markets, or the "side of town" the Alliances aren't on?
 
HelloBostonHi said:
We also have AerLingus with a pretty great presence at Boston and Norwegian Airlines does some good cheap transatlantics. Flown each of them from Boston in the past 12 months because they have really competitive prices to Europe... Oh and Thomas Cook, not sure if they're still around Boston but they did competitive priced flights to Europe
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Thomas Cook cut service to Boston after last year. You can add them to the list along with Air Europa, Air Berlin and Eurowings as European carriers who have come and gone from Boston recently.

Arlington said:
Would a JetBlue Mint A321XLR have the range for Basel-Mulhouse?

And should their strategy focus on primary/hub markets, or the "side of town" the Alliances aren't on?
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Yes, JetBlue's incoming 321XLR will have the range to fly Boston to Basel. Jetblue will have the range to hit all of Western Europe and most of Central Europe from Boston and to a slightly lessen extent New York. This plane will also give them the ability to build out a South American network from Fort Lauderdale as Lima, Bogota, Cali, Barranquilla, Quito, Santiago, Caracas, and multiple cities in Brazil will all be within the plane's range. I think even Buenos Aires can be reached too.

They should focus on the larger cities where you have strong tourist demand - Lisbon, Madrid, Barcelona, Paris, Rome, London (which they have confirmed), Dublin and perhaps another Italian destination. By 2025, I could see them serving 8-10 cities in Europe from both Boston and New York.
 
mass88 said:
They should focus on the larger cities where you have strong tourist demand - Lisbon, Madrid, Barcelona, Paris, Rome, London (which they have confirmed), Dublin and perhaps another Italian destination. By 2025, I could see them serving 8-10 cities in Europe from both Boston and New York.
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How about Amsterdam and/or Brussels?
 
mass88 said:
They should focus on the larger cities where you have strong tourist demand - Lisbon, Madrid, Barcelona, Paris, Rome, London (which they have confirmed), Dublin and perhaps another Italian destination. By 2025, I could see them serving 8-10 cities in Europe from both Boston and New York.
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Is the essential element here "strong tourist demand" or "non-dominant hub"? Or even "Hispanic skew?"

Sure tourist demand is important, but on long-haul / Mint isn't the idea to captivate/capture the Boston business traveler who flies enough (and at last-minute fares) to matter, but not quite enough to be elite?
 
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Fantastic news. Not a big Delta flyer but it’s about time that Boston had a commitment from a full service global airline.
 
Once Southwest leaves terminal A, that will give Delta 20 or 21 gates. It'll be interesting to see how they're able to make up to 200 flights a day work, especially given the that some gates get blocked when they have the 333/332/763s for flights to Paris, Amsterdam and London.

Delta is certainly making some nice moves in Boston as of late - expanding their network to Europe with seasonal service to Dublin, Lisbon and Edinburgh, in additional to their existing year round, daily service to London Heathrow, Paris CDG and Amsterdam. They have their partner airlines Virgin Atlantic, KLM, Air France and now Koreanair to feed into their Boston network. It's going to be interesting how things look at Logan come say 2024 once Massport is done with their major projects and JetBlue gets their European flights going. I could see Delta adding some seasonal Europe flights to places like Brussels and Milan.
 
FYI - Another big bird coming to BOS with LH increasing Munich capacity:

Munich – Boston eff 29MAR20 A380 replaces A340-600, 1 daily
 
Blog post about the rise and fall of Manchester Airport

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/ghosting-airport-chris-van-veen/
The Manchester-Boston Regional Airport (MHT in aviation shorthand) is a very quiet place these days. Save for an outbound flurry of flights in the morning and a second inbound one each evening, MHT is largely devoid of activity between those periods. Our location in the upper northeast corner of the United States is one reason for that, as planes often begin and end the flying day in the ‘corners.’ A Southwest Boeing 737 might leave MHT at 6am bound for Baltimore but end its day 18 hours later in Seattle. That's the way the business works, and it's why an 'outlying' station like MHT is less busy outside of those rush periods.

But it’s a quiet place for other reasons, too, which is the subject of my story. It’s a story that could and does apply to dozens of airports around the country.
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jass said:
Blog post about the rise and fall of Manchester Airport

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/ghosting-airport-chris-van-veen/
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Interesting, thanks.

I used to fly out of MHT all the time, since I lived equidistant between there and Logan in the early/mid-2000s and was doing a ton of business travel at the time. Even before my residence/work changed, I started gravitating more toward Logan, and find the author's analysis to be pretty good...

One point he makes really resonates: I used to fly MHT<->ATL a lot, and when the daily number of flights shrunk such that there was ONE evening option back to MHT, versus 5 back to Logan, I'd opt for Logan even though it was slightly less convenient...because it sucked getting stuck, and when you flew through ATL as much as I did, missing that ONE MHT flight happened a few times...

...But this is too simple of an explanation. There's another dimension: airline booking/refunding behavior changed. On a couple of occasions way back in the day, I was able to convince Delta to book me on one of the Logan return flights (even though my ticket was MHT round trip) when the MHT flight was canceled, rather than to have to stay overnight and return to MHT a day later. "It's basically the same place," I'd say, and the airline person would punch away at their computer until they made it work for me (if there was a fee, it was trivial)...then, at that time, I could expense a car to take me from Logan back to MHT to grab my car. Now there would be a massive fee / you'd pay full price for a ticket for something like that. It solidified, for me, the fragility of flying in/out of MHT: too big a chance of getting stuck. Shifting to the teeny-tiny planes also contributed to this fragility: when people needed to get re-booked it was almost impossible to accommodate them...the 737s/757s had more flex space.

Business travel is all about robustness and flexibility. My heart hurts for MHT, but they need to find a way to accommodate that...while taking into account contemporary airline ticketing behavior.
 
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