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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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.
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