How Do Airlines Decide Which Routes To Fly?

Depending on how often you fly, and where most of your air travel is to and from, you may not have put much thought into airline routes. As with most else in the world of aviation, however, it’s both more complex and more fascinating than you might imagine. With increasingly frequent headlines about major carriers adding new routes, like the first nonstop service between Newark and Greenland or Alaska Airlines’ first-ever European flight, a question naturally arises: Just how do airlines decide which routes to fly, anyway? Let’s dive into the details.

Supply and Demand

As you might imagine, airline route planning mostly comes down to money and efficiency. The reason so many airlines offer flights from Los Angeles to New York City, for example, is simple: Lots of people fly between the two most populous cities in the country, so there’s a smaller chance of empty planes that don’t generate any profit. If you need to get from Boise to Albany, meanwhile, you’re going to have fewer options — and none of them will be direct.

Let’s say an airline hypothetically decides that the latter two cities are on the cusp of becoming the next big thing, and that it’s time for a nonstop flight covering the roughly 2,500 miles between them. Beyond simply choosing to add a route, a number of other logistical concerns have to be addressed: How often should the flight operate? Daily, weekly, only on the weekends, or somewhere in between? What size aircraft should be used? (It’s better to fill a 100-seat plane than to leave a 300-seat plane half-empty.) What kind of traveler is most likely to fly between these two destinations, and which other airlines, if any, will be competing for their business?

You’re probably getting a sense of why so many potential routes never get off the ground. Even if a route is eventually launched, it could be suspended within months if it doesn’t generate enough revenue to make it worthwhile for the airline.

Hubs, Spokes, and Points

Any new passenger traffic needs to fit within a carrier’s existing framework. Experienced air travelers will be familiar with the concept of hubs, which are airports where a given airline concentrates a significant amount of its traffic as part of the hub-and-spoke model. 

This allows airlines to serve smaller cities that wouldn’t otherwise have much demand by feeding into larger hubs, where those passengers can connect to hundreds of other destinations. Denver and Houston are United hubs, for example, while Atlanta and Seattle serve as hubs for Delta, and Phoenix and Miami are hubs for American Airlines. (If you tend not to enjoy your time at LAX, it may be because it’s a hub for all three of those major airlines.)

But that isn’t the only model airlines use. There’s also the point-to-point approach, which is exactly what it sounds like: flying from one major city to another without a layover in between. This model is efficient for destinations that receive a lot of direct traffic, like Los Angeles to Tokyo or New York to London. 

Other Considerations

None of these decisions is made at random. Airlines have entire teams devoted to planning new routes, many of them dedicated solely to international ones, and these teams don’t just work with other departments within the airline. Some cities’ tourism boards will lobby airlines directly in order to persuade them to begin flying direct service, sometimes going so far as to provide airlines subsidies or to spend their own money marketing the new route to boost travel.

If you’ve ever wondered why there’s seasonal service directly from Charleston, South Carolina, to London, for instance, it’s because the city’s Convention and Visitors Bureau took an active role in making it happen, in an effort to establish Charleston as an attractive destination for European travelers. So, the next time you look up at the departures board at the airport and see a surprising or unusual route, you’ll know just how much planning went into it.