United adds roomier regional jets, expands service to Atlanta, New Orleans, Austin. Erin Mulvaney, HoustonChronicle.com
The article goes on to say that United is adding the new ERJ-175 to cover the routes which is a big improvement over the 145 and 170's that they've been flying.
The question, in my mind, is: Why expand now?
Could it be that competition for Atlanta, New Orleans and Austin is heating up?
Possibly, but I have serious doubts that one New Orleans flight to Seattle and a British Airways direct shot from Austin to London is going to hurt business too much. I might wonder if British Airways partnered with Southwest on some kind of feeder agreement into AUS, but I've seen no evidence of that happening.
What I see happening is an United retrenchment at IAH in an effort to stop the bleeding they've experienced of late. A lot of my friends/acquaintances of a traveling persuasion have good things to say about the ERJ-175. I've only flown in them a couple of times via Air Canada and found them to be rather hot to fly in. That said, I like the way UA is choosing to configure them with 12 Business/First seats, 16 Econ+ and 48 Economy seats. That will make sitting in them comfortable at least. And they do have good luggage capacity.
This announcement does make me feel that IAH fits snugly into their long-term routing plans, if they would only make some sense as to what they are. Right now UA has the feeling of an airline that's scrambling for a direction. The rumblings of ineffective management have been getting louder and UA hasn't done much to counter them. It's very clear that Jeff Smisek's second-tier strategy isn't working out as planned. In addition to that, all of the incoming energy executives to the Houston area made UA's decision to "de-emphasize" IAH after the SouthWest/Hobby decision seem short-sighted. This is doubly true if the never-dying promise of PEMEX opening ever comes into being. I would think a strong UA presence at IAH would be uniquely positioned to gobble up most of that traffic.
I don't claim to be an expert in all of the minutia of running an airline (I leave that up to others) but the previous just seems like common sense. And no, I don't think that UA would ever entertain the idea of "de-hubbing" IAH as they did with CLE. IAH is too strategic regionally and they've got huge investments there. It's rare to give up a dominant position when you've worked to hard to attain it. That said, these flights do follow my theory that IAH will downsize from a strong, primary hub to a more regional hub (and gateway to Latin America) going forward. It's very clear that ORD is now United's primary hub, this announcement does nothing to change that. That doesn't mean that it's not a positive for IAH and Houston air-travel as a whole.
