intotheair wrote:All this IAH talk reminds me of a lot of the discussion around DTW in DL threads, especially about 6-7 years ago. Both are huge and important hubs for their respective airlines, but neither of them really get the sexy destinations that the other hubs do.
I think it's great to see the TATL network that UA provides nonstop from places like IAH and DEN, but I can also completely understand why those two hubs didn't see any additions for next year.
The primary difference between DEN and IAH is that DEN has massive domestic demand but a smaller international demand while IAH punches below its weight on domestic demand but has very large international demand. DEN receives a lot of leisure traffic which IAH does not, but IAH is a rich source of ethnic travel and DEN is not. Demand for DEN also swells at specific times of the year and falls off other times. IAH does not have a seasonality because, as has been correctly pointed out, its not a leisure destination.
That means that, from a route planning perspective, any international flight to/from DEN would need to rely on JV partner hubs. That way they can funnel passengers to Denver, then to another JV hub like FRA, MUC, or NRT, and then onwards. Its also why I honestly don't see how flights to AMS or CDG make any sense to/from DEN on UA. LHR is such a big market that it doesnt need to be a JV or Star hub. Domestically, its another story. UA can connect virtually any city in the US to DEN and it will be an almost instant success. Its why DEN almost never gets its domestic spokes cut even when ORD and IAH do. I think the next flight we see to Europe from DEN will be to ZRH and it will probably be from LX as opposed to UA.
As for IAH, its traffic flows are a lot less traditional than DEN. International traffic to/from IAH is three pronged: ethnic/energy industry/geography. Houston is an exceptionally diverse place and that drives ethnic travel especially to Mexico, Central America, South America, Southeast Asia, China (Pre-Pandemic), and Nigeria. UA's IAH-SAL/GUA/TGU/SAP flights have their own check in areas because those flights generate such long lines and people multiple bags. However ethnic travel is not usually prioritized by airlines except for low cost carriers. But that is where geography comes in. IAH is the best hub to serve Latin America from a geographic position and even EWR plays second fiddle to IAH in this region.
As far as the energy industry is concerned, there is really only three routes that UA serves from IAH that reflect: POS, AMS, and GIG. As we've seen UA isn't interested in expanding IAH-Europe and AMS is not certainly not a JV or Star hub. IAH-AMS has a very large O&D which is split between IAH and AMS point of sale and the fares are high thanks to the energy industry. Hell when UA had to cancel a flight to AMS because of issues there they chose IAD. As we can see from the most recent announcement they certainly prioritize IAD over IAH for European flights. It also has the most premium capacity of all of UA's AMS flights. That says a lot. As for GIG, its all about Petrobras. Energy is probably also why, even though DEN is better geographically positioned to serve Asia, IAH-NRT came back much sooner than DEN-NRT and why NH serves IAH instead of DEN.
The comparison of IAH to DTW is overall a pretty good one, though I would add one caveat: IAH has about 2.5X as much international demand as DTW. That said, what DTW was for DL to Asia (pre pandemic) is not that far away from what IAH is to Latin America for UA and both have similar amounts of domestic capacity though IAH has a lot more domestic destinations than DTW. Im sure a big part of that is that Houston is simply much larger an area than Detroit. All in all though, its not a bad comparison.