Caribbean Routings

[ITRADE]

For you marketing/planning folks and for general discussion:

Has US considered adding a late evening bank of flights for Caribbean services? Given that Star is going to be bringing in passengers and US will be the one Star member with a complete blanket on the Caribbean, it would make sense to add an evening bank of flights from CLT or, more likely, PHL to some of the bigger Caribbean spots.

Perhaps AUA, MBJ, STT, SXM, and CUN could get an evening service. The plane could depart PHL late enough to ensure all the passengers arrive from European destinations, overnight at the Caribbean destination, and then depart the Caribbean spot early enough to bring back folks to make their international connections (or to bring back folks to make east/northbound connections - leaving the afternoon flight for Europe).

I understand that there would be a crew overnight issue here, but perhaps the afternoon crew would do an out and back and the evening crew would get the overnight.

Thoughts?

 

[robbedagain]

if we had a real marketing department then this could have been implemented a few years ago when we started the carribbean runs. and may be even open up a few more west coast cities such as slc

 

[ITRADE]

That's acutally a good point.

As it is now, the only west coast connections that are possible are the red-eye flights from the Left Coast. The evening bank would all connections from basically all west coast cities on at least two Caribbean banks.

 

[ringmaruf]

In theory, I totally agree that there should be connections available for European pax and so forth. And I do think that it's inevitable that US will be adding capacity to existing Caribbean destinations in the near future--if only because there are really only a few more new ones (POS and POP, for example) to add before US flies everywhere that they're going to fly in the Caribbean. However, I don't think it's necessarily wise to have cities with 2x daily to PHL and none to CLT. What I would suggest is a morning bank out of CLT and an evening bank out of PHL for the cities that will have two dailies. The only problem I could see is PHL not being able to handle (gates, runways, whatever) a Caribbean bank at the same time as the European bank.