Delta Airlines has a major operation in Boston, heavily competing with JetBlue (or so I heard). With Delta making good growth in Boston, Delta has decided to upgrade to Hub Status from Focus City.
Delta currently Operates from Terminal A at Logan Airport, and they are planning on getting five of their gates from Southwest back once WN moves to Terminal B. The only gate, Gate A1, is being leased to Westjet Encore when Delta isn’t using it.
My Opinion on this matter
This is great, this means that Delta is offering a lot of options from Boston, which is competing against JetBlue on most routes.
What do you think about this update to Hub Status? Comment below :)
Awesome to see Delta bounce back from bankruptcy in 2005. This is wonderful news for the New England and Boston area. The battle is definitely not over yet though. Despite Logan bursting at the seams already, Delta and JetBlue will continue to fight by adding more frequencies and destinations.
Delta Virtual has been buzzing about this since the news broke. Additionally, they’re adding SJC (@BigBert10) and BNA as focus cities, which none of us really saw coming.
Should be interesting to see how they expand at BOSton and how they compete with JetBlue.
It will definitely be interesting. It’s been an absolute bloodbath the last few years. Both Delta and JetBlue have essentially maxed out their gates. Now it’s just time to optimize their turnaround times at the gates so they can add as many departures as possible. So far it’s working well, but both airlines will desperately need some more real estate very soon.
Nope. Different aircraft get based in different hubs. We’re not one of those. Maybe in the future, Delta will do an equipment hub reshuffle and we’ll be lucky to get the newer generation Delta fleet. There is also no pilot crew base here (not yet, at least). This does mean more destinations though.
While maybe people will be excited about that, I don’t see it having any purpose as of now…
I don’t like saying it, but SJC is a pretty small airport in terms of airlines. Out of SJC, Delta only serves 4 of the busiest routes as of February 2019. They don’t serve any international route from SJC, and Southwest and Alaska would be giving Delta major competition. Southwest accounts for just over 50% of the passenger traffic at SJC and Alaska just over 11%. Even American Airlines carries more passengers to/from SJC than mainline Delta. If you were to count for both Delta and Compass though, it would add up to more passengers served with the airline than Alaska, yet Alaska has more destinations which would seemingly be easier for many passengers since a lot of people prefer 1-stop flights rather than 2. It’d be interesting to see how this plays out though.
Anyways, since Boston is now a “hub” for Delta, I hope to see either a Boston to Oakland route or a Boston to San Jose route since BOS-SJC exists but only with jetBlue but no airline currently serves OAK-BOS.
Focus cities usually have the potential of becoming a hub later on. This is how Los Angeles, Seattle, and now Boston hubs were formed. With the right growth and competitive prices, Delta might up their operations a lot. Delta was once in 5th place in terms of market share (behind JetBlue, American, US Airways, and United) in Boston just a few years ago. Look at them now.
SJC was surprising for me though. I wasn’t expecting this considering they already have a large presence on the west coast already at their LA and Seattle hubs.
Oakland is served by JetBlue from Boston as well. It’s a summer service from June to September. Should be restarting next week.
I should rephrase it to say year-round like JetBlue serves SJC-BOS or like Delta serves SFO-BOS.
I don’t see this happening, even though it may have the “potential”, Southwest has too many flights from SJC for Delta to be able to compete with them along with the airlines such as United and Alaska which fly from SFO.
It’s also something that would prove the SJC focus city to not be as useful since they serve so many destinations from Seattle and Los Angeles, it’d be fine if they were just to be able to keep SJC as a destination for connecting travelers to fly through, begin their journeys from, or end their journeys.
Yes, an airline can grow rapidly, but Southwest does have better fares a lot of the times, which more travelers will pick. They also have more destinations, so more travelers will pick nonstop, cheaper flights rather than a 1-stop flight costing more.