Haneda International Slots
Background On Tokyo Haneda Expansion. For those who haven’t been keeping track, Tokyo’s busiest airport is adding 50 new daily international slots. Located about nine miles from Central Tokyo, Haneda is preferred by many travelers over Narita International Airport (which takes roughly 1 hour by rail). Tokyo’s Haneda International Airport, which is seeing a resurgence as the city pursues ambitious business and tourism goals, is adding 24 slots to boost capacity ahead of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic and Paralympic Games. US airlines stand to benefit greatly from the move as half the slots will be awarded to them.
The Haneda slot applications are in and, not surprisingly, there is contention over the six slots available to serve the Tokyo airport from the United States. In a slightly surprising move the DoT is requiring all carriers to apply anew for service, even to keep the routes they already have, and there are nine desired routes for the six available slots. Only five of the slots are available for daytime operations but all nine routes are seeking daytime operation. A few airlines are going to find themselves disappointed.
(Reuters) - Delta Air Lines and United Airlines are poised to win the most new daytime slots at Tokyo’s Haneda International Airport in time for the 2020 Summer Olympics, according to a U.S. The Haneda slot applications are in and, not surprisingly, there is contention over the six slots available to serve the Tokyo airport from the United States. In a slightly surprising move the DoT is requiring all carriers to apply anew for service, even to keep the routes they already have, and there are nine desired routes.
Each of the four existing routes – Honolulu on Hawaiian, San Francisco on United, Los Angeles on American and Delta – is back in the application pool; no real surprise there. And each of the four airlines is also seeking additional service. American wants to fly from its hub in DFW, United from Newark and Hawaiian wants to split frequencies between Honolulu and Kona for its second slot. Delta wants two additional slots, one for Minneapolis and the other for Atlanta. Also worth noting is that Hawaiian has listed as a third preference in its application a willingness to take the HNL/KOA flight in the night slot if that’s the only way to get the additional service.
As the only application explicitly willing to take a night slot Hawaiian might earn that second frequency, something it believes it has earned with a note on today’s earnings call that 40% of traffic between Haneda and the USA goes to Hawaii. Of course, some of that is because the other routes have been limited with night operations so it is unclear that the numbers would remain that way moving forward.
If we assume the four existing allocations are kept and converted to daytime then my bet would be on United winning with Newark for the fifth daytime slot – hard to argue a ton with connecting the NYC area with Japan – and Hawaiian gets the night slot for its split service. If the initial four are not all preserved it seems unlikely to me that the DoT would approve multiple carriers operating on the LAX route. Minneapolis seems a weak choice as a secondary hub for Delta while Atlanta has a strong position with the massive connecting flow the carrier can push.
UPDATE (10:20p 16 APR): Turns out DL put MSP as its second priority after LAX and above ATL. Could be a move to try to ensure that LAX sticks around but the prioritization of MSP over ATL makes zero sense to me from a passenger flow perspective.
Perhaps AA keeps LAX and Delta gets ATL instead of its existing LAX service. In the same way an AA swap of LAX for DFW could make sense, though the move to add that service goes against the company’s previously stated desire to expand transpacific capacity from Los Angeles.
It also appears that Delta has relaxed its initial position of demanding all the Haneda slots so as to move its Narita hub operation wholesale into the new operation. This is not particularly surprising as that was never really going to happen, but it is nice to see that the application is measured.
I would be very surprised in Newark doesn’t win one of the slots. Nonstop service from New York City seems a very compelling argument and United can connect a decent amount of east coast traffic as it does with the current Narita flight time. JFK was one of the original slot awards when Haneda first opened but American eventually dropped the route due to weakness attributed to the flight times. And despite both Delta and American having a strong hub presence at JFK neither of them went for the Haneda slot there.
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Haneda International Slots Games
Seven countries including China, Russia and Australia have won 26 of the 50 new international slots created at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport in the run-up to next year’s Olympic and Paralympic Games, transport ministry officials said Monday.
Finland, India, Italy and Turkey have also been handed slots, alongside one region, Scandinavia. Sweden or Denmark is likely to get that regional opening.
The remaining 24 slots had already been allocated to flights to and from the United States. The government is trying to attract 40 million annual visitors to Japan by 2020.
The new slots will enter daily service at Haneda, officially called Tokyo International Airport, from late March.
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Airlines will decide which cities they will fly to, according to the officials at the Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism Ministry.
Flights to and from China will receive eight slots, those to and from Russia and Australia will get four each, and the others will get two each, the officials said, adding that — except for China — the slots will initially start service time in the daytime from 6 a.m. to 10:55 p.m.
Japanese airlines will receive half of the 50 slots, with All Nippon Airways Co. landing 13.5 of them and Japan Airlines Co. getting 11.5.
New flight paths over central Tokyo will be introduced in spring 2020, as the government plans to increase the number of international flight slots to 99,000 from about 60,000 before the Tokyo Games.
About 15 km from central Tokyo, Haneda was the world’s fifth-busiest airport in terms of total passenger traffic in 2018, according to the Airports Council International.
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