Delta Air Lines Says Boston Is Now One of Its Hub Cities
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It's official. Boston is now a hub for Delta Air Lines.
The carrier confirmed the city's change in status on Monday, according to FlightGlobal.
"We've been making significant investments in Boston this year… this has really enabled us to graduate Boston from what we consider a focus city to our newest coastal hub," Amy Martin, Delta's managing director of domestic network planning, is quoted as saying by FlightGlobal.
Martin's comments came during the Airport Council International-North America's JumpStart conference in Nashville.
Delta has grown rapidly during the past year in Boston, increasingly taking on JetBlue, the city's busiest carrier.
Delta's capacity in Boston is projected to increase by 14.5% year-over-year in 2019; that compares to an increase of just about 4% across the rest of Delta's network, according to FlightGlobal's calculations.
Delta has added numerous domestic routes from Boston, most recently Miami. Additionally, Martin says Delta will now look to the city as a secondary gateway for trans-Atlantic flights. It has recently added nonstop routes from Boston to Edinburgh, Scotland, and Lisbon, Portugal.
"Boston is actually very well positioned geographically to be a connecting point for US passengers going transatlantic," she's quoted as saying by FlightGlobal. "As we're getting to kind of our maximum capacity at [New York] JFK, using Boston as a secondary transatlantic gateway makes a lot of sense."
Boston becomes the second city to be elevated to hub status by Delta in recent years. The airline also designated Seattle a hub after several years of growth there.
However, the addition of Boston and Seattle as hubs comes after Delta pulled the plugs on two others earlier this decade. The carrier "de-hubbed" Memphis in 2013 and Cincinnati in 2017.