Originally Posted by
UALinIAH
The O&D traffic is there. Business travel is down with oil down but we don't even have a true first class seat anymore anyway.
HOUSTON - No city in the United States is growing faster in population than Houston. Newly released census numbers show our growth beat out several major cities, including Dallas.
Census data shows Houston leads in population growth across U.S.
Did you check that article's date?
Posted: 7:30 AM, March 24, 2016
Updated: 6:07 PM, March 24, 2016
Did you know the 'latest' census data is from 2015?
I have posted an article written by the University of Houston that is less than a week old stating that the regional economy's done poorly for the last few years. Finding old data that predates the slide in oil prices is not pertinent to this topic.
O&D traffic - it's pretty much flat for Houston. O&D traffic from IAH was negative in 2016. Research it, find some recent numbers and post them - no stale numbers please. Take out Southwest's international expansion at HOU a couple of years ago and the numbers would look a lot worse.
Bottom line: the airline continues to grow and continues to be unjeffed. jeff's team overbuilt the IAH base - whether due to cronyism or incompetence doesn't matter - and the double whammy of low oil prices means that IAH continues to be overstaffed years later. Unjeffing this airline means moving jets and people to where the customers are and want to go, not having customers pass through airports that have negative O&D. This isn't hard to understand.