Hubless with high fares — how Delta hosed Cincinnati (watchout Cleveland)

For years, Cincinnati International Airport (which is actually located in Northern Kentucky), has been one of the easiest places to make connections. With a Delta hub, a modern facility, and a more temperate climate, the airport has been very user-friendly, unless you live there or are flying to Cincinnati and care about airfares.

Delta made Cincinnati a fortress-hub, meaning they had a very high percentage of flights in and out of the airport, and thus they were able to intimidate discount carriers and other competition.

Southwest, for example, decided to fly to the smaller communities of Columbus and Indianapolis. Other discount carriers also avoided Cincinnati like the plague, figuring Delta would easily drive them out. (Many local corporations also had Delta contracts.)

Now Delta has reduced the hub almost to the point of nonexistence, closing one terminal and turning their second terminal into something that often resembles a ghost town. A quote from a USA Today article shows how stark the numbers are.

“Cincinnati was Delta’s second-largest hub, behind Atlanta, as recently as 2005, when it and Comair combined to offer about 600 flights a day. In January 2009, the Cincinnati hub had 280 daily flights. Today, the number is between 160 and 175, depending on the day of the week.”

Other cities have failed as hubs, Orlando, St. Louis, and Las Vegas come to mind, but they had more competition when they were hubs, and have a number of discount options.

Pittsburgh was a “fortress hub” for US Airways, and was very extremely hard hit when they pulled out, but the airport now has service from JetBlue and Southwest.

Not only does Southwest, the largest purely domestic carrier, still not serve Cincinnati, which serves a metropolitan population of over two million, (larger even than Cleveland) but Frontier, Airtrans and JetBlue also avoid it.

So now the city has limited flights, and high fares. (One example, a same day round-trip from any Washington DC area airport, only about 400 miles away, is currently over $1100.)

Maybe someday a discount carrier will see an opportunity and move into Cincinnati, but for now, it’s the worst of both worlds. And while Delta is a five-letter word, many locals in Northern Kentucky and southern Ohio really think it should be considered a four-letter one.

Meanwhile, Cleveland is trying to avoid the same fate as Continental, its fortress carrier, merges with United. Continental controls more than 65 percent of the flights in and out of Cleveland and has more than 2,000 employees at the airport and 1,000 others with the airline’s regional partners. The city fathers have obtained a five-year stay of execution it seems with the soon-to-be-merged CO/UA agreeing to keep flights at current levels.

However, if the newly merged airline follows the same route as Delta in Cincinnati and forces out new competition, Cleveland may only be delaying the inevitable. The city fathers should be working like mad to attract a couple of strong low cost carriers for the day that Continental abandons them.

Tagged as: Cincinnati airport, delta, Delta Airlines, southwest