Transatlantic operations at Gatwick

[colegate]

I see that American has abandoned its daily service from Gatwick to St Louis. St Louis is a fine hub airport and has the highest concentration of flights by a single airline (American) at any major US airport. AA's Gatwick service was timed to connect with numerous flight throughout the mid west, southwest and west coast. Immigration through St Louis was much easier than any other major US airport in my experience. American also has a strong marketing presence in the UK and Europe and many of its newly code shared flights with BA at LGW would have provided connections to the St Louis service. St Louis had operated by AA and TWA before it for about 20 years. It has presumably been dropped because of financial losses.

If such a potentially good service has been dropped for financial reasons what hope can there possibly be for the three routes that US Air operates from Gatwick. They are Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Charlotte. All three are much weaker hubs that St Louis and Charlotte has a limited range of services mainly up and down the east coast? US Air has no obvious marketing presence in the UK, they do very little advertising.

Rumour has it that these three services have large proportions of frequent flyer redemptions on them. Can anyone confirm whether this is true? If it is true it means that the revenue on these flights will be small. If so why are they being operated at all?

[uy707]

I think AA just wanted the slots at Saint-Louis
Too bad, this airport is just finely located almost right on the middle of the continental US, much better located than DFW or even ORD for offering less than 3 hr long connecting flights to every part of the country.
-the service to Paris-CDG was not even assumed :suspect:
As for US and CLT, they also offer connection to PHX/SAN/SFO and LAX. From CDG they serve CLT and PHL. There too, they make little advertising.
Alain