Quote:
Originally Posted by AvgeekDL
True, but what I don’t understand is why people thought it would fail. As we all know, people tend to underestimate Austin and the region. They only look at the Austin MSA proper and fail to realize that the Austin catchment area is much larger. In a lot of ways, ABIA serves San Antonio as well, plus Waco and even as far east as College Station. And this is what separates Austin from its peers such as Nashville, Raleigh-Durham, New Orleans, Indianapolis, etc. The market is really an anchor to a much larger booming metropolis that will one day rival Dallas/Fort Worth and Houston. It also helps that Austin is the seat of government for the 11th largest economy in the world.
It should be no surprise that British Airways has had runaway success. I expect Lufthansa to do well too (maybe not quite as well, but successful enough where it will be daily eventually). I also expect Delta/SkyTeam to do well when they inevitably launch both CDG and AMS. Bottom line, demand is there. AUS isn’t likely going to match the connectivity and level of service DFW/IAH has, but it will be a strong third international airport with all major European hubs covered and eventually, an Asian hub or two.
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Well, you have to put yourself in the mindset of five years ago. AUS was the first non-hub second tier city to get a transatlantic flight. It just hadn’t been tried before. It wasn’t the largest city in the US without TATL, nor was it the busiest airport without it. And the available PDEW numbers made it look marginal. Plus, the annual traffic numbers then were much smaller.
Granted, there was a lot of unnecessary naysaying too (ahem*a.net). But statements like “the demand is there” weren’t self-evident at the time. I really *wanted* the service to do well, but I was afraid it wouldn’t.
We had also seen Air Canada come and leave around 2000/2001; AUS-MEX had been tried by both Mexicana and AeroMexico, both of whom threw in the towel and left. VivaAerobus had come, built the South Terminal, and spectacularly failed (admittedly the big Swine Flu panic of 2009 played a big role, but they were struggling to fill planes before then). We didn’t even have reliable connections to east coast connection hubs like JFK (except on JetBlue). AUS was not tried-and-proven on int’l traffic. If anything, it was proven that demand was fairly weak.
So, yeah, we can look at it five years on when BA operates the flight 8 months out of the year with the second biggest bird in its flight and say “duh,” but we’ve got a lot of hindsight here. BA took a gamble and it paid off. Tbqh, the reason we know many of the things you say in your post is
because of the BA service.
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