United Airlines anticipates a spike in travel demand by December as the Biden administration already announced its plans to welcome vaccinated foreign tourists. The carrier announced its plans to increase its domestic flights for December to 3,500 domestic flights a day. That’s the most number of domestic flights for United since the pandemic started.
United’s December schedule includes more flights to popular ski and beach destinations. The carrier scheduled as many as 195 flights per day to 12 airports located in Florida. The airline first mentioned its plans to expand its services in Florida last year.
Included in the plan is to add up to 28 nonstop flights from northern cities to four airports in Florida. Flights coming from LaGuardia Airport in New York, Boston, and Cleveland to Fort Lauderdale, Fort Myers, Orlando, and Tampa start by November 6. And by December, United announced that there will be nonstop flights going to Fort Meyers and Tampa coming from Columbus, Ohio, Indianapolis, Milwaukee, and Pittsburgh.
United used a new strategy to pick up their domestic flights for December. United and other major airlines usually relied on using routes via large hub airports. This time around, United’s attempt to increase flights to Florida made use of non-hub airports. This strategy that utilizes of point-to-point flying is more commonly used by budget airlines such as Spirit.
United’s vice president of domestic network planning said that the carrier is taking a “surgical” approach to adding domestic flights. For instance, the carrier noticed an uptick in searches for flights to Florida.
However, Gupta acknowledged the recent surge of COVID19 cases in Florida. Gupta said that “We’ll adjust our capacity when needed”.
Unfortunately, airline recovery and the number of COVID cases are usually related. United announced that it trimmed its flights for third quarter following the surge in COVID cases.
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