United Aims for First Place Airline

United is taking a play from the aviation handbook of the 1990s in order to expand the airline and strengthen its hubs throughout the Midwest. The ultimate goal? To get back to the number-one spot in the major airline rankings, passing over Delta and American.

Back in 2010, when airlines-mileageplus-681/” target=”_blank”>United took over Continental, the airline began having some trouble. It was forced to shrink, and caved to investor demands that capacity lessened in order to hopefully improve fares and profits. But it was a bad choice, United’s president Scott Kirby told Bloomberg Pursuits. Domestic seat growth shrank by 8 percent through 2016 while its rivals continued to grow.

Now, Kirby wants to reverse that trend.

“Our growth – and strengthening our hubs – is absolutely the critical, essential element to driving higher … margins at United,” Kirby told analysts. “I’m absolutely certain about it.”

His plan is to increase growth at a large rate, expanding capacity annually by up to 6 percent through 2021—which JP Morgan analyst told Bloomberg is about the size of Spirit Airlines. The strategy is something that last happened in the 1990s and is now considered less-than-polite to do in the modern aviation business.

“United is, to some degree, ripping up the airline economics playbook from the past decade,” Seth Kaplan, managing partner of Airline Weekly, told Bloomberg.

In the meantime, the airline industry continues to add capacity overall. Analysts expect a 5 percent increase this year, even though oil prices are getting higher. And while that may mean more profits for the airlines themselves, it also means the customers might benefit from lower fares as a result.

[Photo: Shutterstock]