Delta Airlines To Fly Seattle to Tokyo Narita- What This Means

Delta Airlines will commence daily flights from Seattle to Tokyo Narita on an Airbus A330-900NEO effective March of this year. This addition complements their existing service from Seattle to Tokyo Haneda, the more popular and preferred airport in the city. The current service will remain unaffected. For Delta, service to Narita holds strategic significance beyond being an additional route; it represents a sustained effort to establish dominance in Seattle against competitor Alaska, which recently announced a Seattle-Narita route. Despite being the least profitable hub for any U.S. airline, Delta is determined to maintain its West Coast presence and prevent competitors from gaining control over the Asia markets. Delta’s unprofitability was revealed by analyst One Mile At A Time, who reported, “When you crunch the numbers with that methodology, the single least profitable hub of any major US airline is Delta’s hub in Seattle. Only 5% of the carrier’s routes out of the airport aren’t in the bottom 40% of the carrier’s network in terms of revenue per available seat mile. Apparently the hub has been performing very poorly for years now, but it seems the situation is getting even worse. A year ago, 7% of routes weren’t in the bottom 40% of Delta’s routes, while now that number is down to just 5%.”