BoeingBoy
Veteran
- Nov 9, 2003
- 16,512
- 5,865
- Banned
- #346
One thing that PHL is short on that hasn't been mentioned yet is *A connectivity. Except for the lone LH flight, passengers depend on US for travel between the U.S. and Europe if they use PHL no matter what their U.S. point of departure or European destination are. Compare that to both IAD and PHL - people can come into or depart from either to Europe on a variety of *A carriers, all potentially providing feed to/from domestic routes of UA/CO - feed that isn't present at PHL (except the aforementioned LH flight). To a lesser degree, the same is true of Asia, S.America, etc traffic. Naturally, for US, UA, and CO the best situation is to carry the passenger the furtherest - including the TA or TP segment - since it gets them more of the revenue from that passenger. But the rest of the *A carriers feel the same way - they don't want to be relegated to just feeding their passengers to a European, Asian, etc gateway hub and turning those passengers over to either US/UA/CO - those carriers don't operate flights to the U.S. for the fun of it. So being able to accept those TA or TP passengers at a U.S. gateway was well as an offshore *A partner's gateway is of some importance. PHL loses to IAD/EWR on half that equation.
Jim
Jim