Cruising Altitude is a weekly column about air travel. Have a suggestion for a future topic? Fill out the form or email me at the address at the bottom of this page.
Sometimes, people have to fly, either for work or personal reasons. Other times, travelers don’t even know they want to take a trip until an airline offers them a new opportunity. In a cutthroat industry, new airlines are targeting underserved markets to generate demand for trips that may have previously been taken by another mode of transportation, or not taken at all.
“The vast majority of traffic that we fly is stimulated traffic,” David Neeleman, the CEO and founder of Breeze Airways, told me. “We’re basically generating demand where it didn’t exist before.”
When an airline starts a new route, a significant part of making it successful is attracting customers who want to keep coming back.
Often, that means drawing passengers away from other airlines who are already operating trips, but in many cases, new airline routes can initiate entirely new trip patterns that didn’t exist before.
