Breaking Travel News

United boosts Denver service

United Airlines plans to expand service from Denver—one of its key U.S. domestic hubs—and by adding 32 more flights from the hub by June 2006. With this increase, United will provide 455 daily departures from Denver. This is a more than seven percent increase over United’s current Denver schedule and a four percent increase over last June.

In addition to its previously announced new service to Toronto, United and United Express will increase frequencies to cities already served from Denver, including Boston, Baltimore, New York-La Guardia, Los Angeles, San Francisco and St. Louis, and many more.

In addition, Ted—United’s low- fare service—will add one frequency each to Las Vegas; Reno, Nev.; and Ontario, Calif.

The service increase is made possible by United’s current efforts to more efficiently use assets—including gates and aircraft—which, when fully implemented, will deliver the equivalent of at least 10 additional aircraft with existing resources.

United is targeting turn times, among other things, to do so, and aims to reduce its average turns by eight minutes to free up aircraft for more flying in 2006. Turn-time reduction is now underway.

ADVERTISEMENT

“We are pleased to convert our efficiency gains from resource optimization into more service for customers from one of our most important hubs,” says Kevin Knight, vice president-Resource Planning. “Denver will continue to be a key part of United’s network. Resource optimization will enable us to take advantage of our Denver infrastructure to add service in an extremely cost- efficient way. We will continue to pursue improvement initiatives to not just meet but exceed our customers’ needs.”

With this increase, United will provide service from Denver to more than 100 cities across the United States, Canada and Mexico, with connections to international destinations around the world.

“We are very pleased United has added additional capacity into Denver,” said Turner West, co-manager of aviation for Denver International Airport. “This certainly reflects United’s renewed commitment to our city, state and region.”

United’s resource optimization program is part of its focus on continuous improvement in all areas of the company.

The efforts aim to make the best use of the company’s core assets (including aircraft and real estate) and are on target to contribute significantly to the company’s bottom line.

Key focus areas include tightening aircraft turns; depeaking operations at additional hubs; optimizing block time to improve customer connections and on-time results; and better utilization of real estate, such as gates and facilities.
——-