You guys are easy...
5 passengers??? Tough times ahead.
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Now Delta is fighting back.
Delta is saying that the demand between Atlanta and Doha is less than five people per day, so how can that possibly be the basis of a route? Per
Forbes:
“Demand is less than five people a day” for Atlanta-Doha service, incoming Delta President Glen Hauenstein said Thursday on the carrier’s first quarter earnings call. He referred to the demand for travel between Atlanta and Doha, not including connecting passengers at either destination.
Later, asked whether Delta operates any routes where it has only five origin and destination passengers a day, Hauenstein responded sarcastically, “We don’t have any flights crossing the world that have less than 10 people a day.”
Delta president and incoming CEO Ed Bastian added, “We do have some markets that we have four or five passengers on.
“We call that Delta Private Jets,” Bastian said, referring to Delta’s luxury jet charter subsidiary.
This is a very unsophisticated argument on Delta’s part. We all know there’s not much demand for travel on the Gulf carriers to their actual hubs, but rather that their business models are based around offering connecting flights. That’s the whole argument the US carriers make, so I’m not sure why they’re trying to undermine it with this point.
And for that matter, I’d bet there are many Delta routes with similar numbers. I’d be very curious what the daily demand is between Minneapolis and Amsterdam, a route which Delta serves daily. It’s pretty disingenuous for them to pretend the don’t rely on connecting traffic just as much in many markets.