The de-I Guide to Air Travel Planning - Part Two - Understanding the Airline System

We are in the second of the four part series discussing how de-I and Wife plan their travel. Please note:

• I am focusing primarily on international travel though many of the issues we cover would apply to domestic or short-haul travel.
• I have a bias toward what I will call standard, full-service airlines as opposed to discount airlines. This ties into my first post where I talk about the variables important to you. With my preferences, the advantages of a discount airline often disappear as I have to pay extra for all the things I prefer.

So with that in mind let's talk about how the majority of main stream airlines operate, and why that is important to your planning. 

The vast majority of major airlines that serve the international trade operate with what is called a hub and spoke system. The hub and spoke system makes use of a small number of major airports that act as 'hubs'. Traffic is funneled into the 'hubs' from a wide number of outlying locations. These routes are the 'spokes'. There are also only a limited number of major airlines flying these international routes. When you combine these two sets of data, you find that your options on how to get from Point A to Point B reduce substantially. Here is a non-complete, unofficial list of major international carriers and their hubs. (I am leaving out airlines and locations in Latin America as I've had no experience with them)

United States

• American Airlines - Charlotte, Chicago, Dallas/Ft. Worth, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Los Angeles
  
• Delta Airlines - Atlanta, Boston, New York, Los Angeles, Salt Lake City, Seattle, Minneapolis, Detroit
  
• United Airlines - New York, Washington D.C., Chicago, Houston, Denver, Los Angeles, San Francisco
  

Europe

• British Airways - London
  
• Air France - Paris
  
• KLM - Amsterdam
  
• Lufthansa - Frankfort, Munich
  
• Lot - Warsaw
  
• Iberia - Madrid
  
• ITA - Rome
  

Middle East

• Eithad - Abu Dhabi
  
• Emirates - Dubai
  
• Qatar - Doha
  
• Turkish - Istanbul
  

East Asia

• Asiana - Seoul
  
• Ana - Tokyo
  
• Japan Airlines - Tokyo
  
• Korean Airlines - Seoul
  
• EVA - Taipei
  
• Malaysian - Kuala Lumpur
  
• China Airlines - Taipei
  
• Starlux - Taipei
  
• Singapore - Singapore
  

You will note that the vast majority of the 'hubs' are located in major cities around the world. And the majority of long haul international travel is between hub and hub. Unless you live in one of them, you are going to have to take a 'spoke' route into the hub to get where you are going. 

One should also note that these airlines have combined in three major alliances - One World, Sky Team, and Star Alliance. These alliances allow airlines to show flight options booked on one ticket as if they were one airline. I will discuss why this is important in a later post.

When planning international travel one should understand that each of these airlines has flights going from their hub to other major hubs. If you know this you can in your own mind map out the possibilities of getting from one place to another. 

For example, I recently planned a trip in 2026 to South East Asia. But I didn't know exactly where in SE Asia I was going to go. So I chose a couple of hubs in SE Asia where I know many other short haul flights go in and out of. These were Kuala Lumpur and Singapore, With this information, I could now limit the number of options on how to get to these hubs. And I could, in my own mind, start thinking about how I would get from where I am, Albuquerque, a minor spoke city, to where I wanted to go. 

This still leaves you with a heck of a lot of options. So how do we refine things so we can find what we want and not go crazy? In my next post, I am going to walk you through an actual search and purchase I recently conducted to show you how I use this information.