Two days after announcing the cancellation of its high profile Hartford-to-Los Angeles direct flight, Delta Air Lines on Wednesday announced the addition of two direct flights in the coming months from Bradley International Airport in Windsor Locks.
“The success of any new route will be determined by passenger response,” Delta spokesman Anthony Black said.
Starting on Halloween, Delta will have three daily flights to and from Bradley and Ronald Reagan National Airport in Washington D.C. It will compete with direct D.C. service from Bradley by U.S. Airways into Reagan and United Airlines into Dulles International Airport.
On Oct. 2, Delta also is adding Saturday-only direct service to Las Vegas. Southwest Airlines already offers non-stop service to Las Vegas from Bradley.
“Regardless of whether other carriers service those routes, we examine each new route to see if there is a sufficient amount of demand,” Black said. “There’s probably not a lot of routes where you don’t have competition between carriers.”
The addition of Washington, D.C. by Delta is part of a larger rollout of its East Coast operations, adding seven national non-stops out of Reagan and 29 enhanced routes out of New York City’s two airports, mostly to international destinations.
The schedule for the new Hartford-Washington, D.C. and Hartford-Las Vegas routes will be approved this weekend. The three Washington, D.C. routes will take place morning, afternoon and evening.
On Monday, Delta announced the end of its non-stop Hartford-Los Angeles flights, effective Sept. 30, less than two months after the service began. When that flight started June 10, Bradley officials touted it as a high-profile route giving the airport a direct West Coast connection.
Delta officials said while bookings for the Bradley-L.A. flight were strong over the summer, they tapered off in the fall. The airline decided to keep it as a summer-only service. No determination has been made if the L.A. flight will return in 2011.
“The market continues to perform well, but there are niches in the market where you will see spikes in demand to along certain routes and drops in demand to other destinations,” Black said.
With the subtraction of Los Angeles and the addition of Las Vegas and Washington, D.C., Delta will fly to 14 destinations non-stop out of Bradley International, including to its hubs in Atlanta, Detroit, Minneapolis and Cincinnati.
“With those hubs, you can fly anywhere in our network with one connection,” Black said.
