I am not a big traveler but I always hear people say “hub” & from what I’m gathering it’s like a home base for certain airlines? Why do people like/not like them?
For example delta has a hub in atl but everyone complains about flying delta out of atl because “it’s a hub”…
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ATL for example is a huge connection point, as Delta routes many of their regional jet routes in the Southeast US to/from Atlanta, and it’s also used for connecting flights to Florida and many international routes (Latin America and south America in particular).
As such, the passenger volume at ATL is huge, and likewise security lines and parking/transportation can be less convenient than smaller airports.
Delta Airlines is headquartered in Atlanta – ATL airport is a Delta Hub
Southwest Airlines is headquartered in Dallas- Dallas love field Is a Southwest Hub
American Airlines is headquartered in Fort Worth. American Airlines hub is DFW airport
Ex
Airlines can have many different “hubs”, but I just used their headquarter location as an example
So if you’re operating an airline, you need to schedule flights. You need to try to maximize the people on any given flight, but that’s hard coming from small regional airports or even some mid-sized cities. Sure, while a lot of them are going to Orlando or Los Angeles or New York, you’ve also got a lot of them going to some random airport somewhere that no one else wants to go to very often.
So you could run a bunch of tiny planes from, say, Toledo to Des Moines and from Memphis to Omaha, but you’d have entire days or weeks where no one wanted to fly that particular route. It’s horribly inefficient.
So the solution is to operate a hub-and-spoke system, augmented with direct flights to popular destinations. How that works is you have a *lot* of flights on larger planes that are all going to a single airport — Atlanta, JFK, O’Hare, Detroit, LAX, etc. Then you have a lot of flights *leaving* those hub airports.
That way, if I want to fly from Buffalo to Oklahoma City, I don’t have to wait for an airline to offer that route which just isn’t going to be all that popular; instead, I get a flight from Buffalo to Chicago (very popular because there are lots of people who can pick up flights to their destination there) and then a second flight from Chicago to Oklahoma City (again very popular because a lot of the people going to Oklahoma City can get to O’Hare). That lets the airline run bigger, more efficient planes and not have to worry about how few people are actually flying from Buffalo to Oklahoma City specifically.
In other words, you put everyone flying *from* Buffalo on one plane. Then in Chicago, you can spread them all out to their various destinations while collecting all the people flying *to* Oklahoma onto a single plane, no matter which airport they started at. It’s super-efficient.
The main *problem* with hubs — aside from the passenger’s need to switch planes, which can be a hassle — is that because of their popularity, they’re very crowded. Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International is the single busiest airport in the world. Why? It’s not because Atlanta is a hugely popular destination. It’s because Delta’s main hub is there and they operate flights from Atlanta to most of North America, to the Caribbean, to South America, to Europe, to Africa. All from that one airport.
Some airports do mainly short national flights to more major airports where the passengers change to another aircraft to travel internationally. The location where passengers do a lot of changing aircraft to board international flights is called a hub.
The most efficient air travel method is basically to have one airport that basically has connections to all of your partner airports, meaning that anyone can get anywhere in at least two flights. Doing this also simplifies a lot of the operations for the airlines, as you can concentrate a lot of the logistics involved in running an airline to that hub.
The only issue is that hubs are massive and busy, and have a harder time dealing with delays than smaller airports. The sheer scope of the operations of airports like Dallas Love or Atlanta or Chicago O’Hare means that, if you’re gonna have a problem at any point in your travel, it’s gonna happen in those hubs, and it’s harder to resolve because the machine of airport logistics can’t just stop to fix your issues.
Airlines have a lot going on. Part of their job is done by pilots and flight attendants operating a flight. Part of their job is servicing planes and making sure they’re all good. The other part is providing services to customers outside of the flight. Hubs make all of these things easier and cheaper.
Number 1: Actually operating flights.
Airlines need to keep costs down and therefore make sure planes are full. Hubs make this job way easier. Think about it this way – let’s say your job was to predict the demand between SF and Jacksonville, Charleston and Nashville. The demand between these cities is less stable and maybe at most can fill one flight a day (this is an example, not real numbers). You decide that only SF to Nashville is a profitable route and have service there. BUT let’s instead say you had a hub at Atlanta that has flights to all the destinations in the southeast? Now you can say – hey what’s the demand between SF and all of the destinations in the Southeast? That demand is really high and more predictable. You can now run 10 flights a day between SF and ATL knowing they’ll be full. And because everybody that wants to go somewhere in the southeast is going to be at Atlanta, you can run multiple flights a day from Atlanta to smaller airports like Jacksonville knowing they’ll be full too. Not to mention the gigantic planes you’ll fly between SF and ATL are going to cost much less to operate per passenger than the smaller plans you’d have to run if you were doing direct flights between SF and a bunch of cities in the southeast. In this way Hubs make it cheaper for airlines to serve a larger network of cities.
Number 2: Servicing the Planes.
Airlines need lots of staff to maintain planes. They also need places to store extra parts etc. Whats cheaper? Having a mechanic crew and parts in every airport you serve? Or having a centralized crew in a hub that can service all planes? This is pretty east. Consolidate. One crew of 20 in a central hub can do the work of 10 crews of 5 in 10 different airports (made up numbers).
Number 3: Servicing Customers.
Airlines don’t just fly you. They offer lots of services at the gate like customer support, lounges, executive check in. Could an airline afford to do all this at every airport they operate in? Probably not. But can they invest in really nice terminals and lounges in a few hubs? For sure they can. And because you’ll probably be flying through one of their hubs (see point 1) you’ll get to experience this level of service at some point in your journey. Another service is rebooking. Think back to point 1. Without a hub, you may only have 1 flight a day to some places. With a hub, you have many flights a day because passenger volume is concentrated. So if there is a cancellation, without a hub, you’re shit out of luck. You have to wait the next day. With a hub, they can offer the service of rebooking you on one of the many flights out the same day. They also can have standby crew concentrated in the hubs to operate the plane and have pre negotiated bulk room rates with hotels at the hub so you can have a place to stay in the event the next flight is the next day
There is more that goes into it, but TL;DR economies of scale play out in aviation just like anywhere else, not just to fly planes but also to service them and provide superior service before and after the flight.
The complaint with Atlanta is that, people who are used to smaller airports, think Atlanta is too big.
But of course a hub is going to be big. It exists to connect other destinations that would otherwise not be large enough to support their own flights.
People need to just get used to the idea that, if they’re on a connecting flight, most likely the airport they will be connecting at will be larger than their home or destination airport. And therefore should allow more time than normal.
Say you have 5 cities: A, B, C, D, E and 10 people from each city want to fly to every other city, so 10 people from A want to fly to B, 10 want to fly to C, 10 want to fly to D, etc. There would be 200 people in this example, with 20 different flight paths going on.
You could send those 20 flights, but that is a lot of flights to have. An alternative would be to have a flight to one city from every other city and then the reverse, so maybe flights from B, C, D, and E to city A, and then a flight from city A to cities B, C, D, and E. This way, you only have 8 flights instead of the 20.
Of course, the trade off is that this way, a lot of the people have to take 2 flights. If you’re traveling to or from city A (which is the hub), you only need 1 flight, but otherwise you have to take 2
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