antitrust Biden Big Airline DeWine Moreno ohio Sherrod brown Vance

Holiday travel to/from Ohio a nightmare? Here’s why

Posted on Dec 12, 2024

With Thanksgiving behind us and Christmas coming up, Ohioians traveling to and from the state to visit family might be noticing another thing that has really wound up sucking during the Biden years: Air travel.

For as much as part-time Transportation Secretary and potential future Michigan gubernatorial candidate Pete Buttigieg and his fan base like to boast about how air travel is better under Biden, in reality, the changes they’ve forced are pretty small fry and do nothing to address a major problem for Ohioans: The raft of flight pullbacks and hub closures, which have been worse in the Buckeye state than, say, the West or East coasts.

This problem did start before Biden (all the way back in 1991, US Airways announced it would ditch its Dayton hub).

But it has gotten much worse in the last few years.

For example, the average number of departures out of Cincinnati, a Delta base in the state, were down to 64 flights a day by 2019; in May 2020– so several months after Biden took office– the airline giant closed its pilot base there altogether.

All of this has overlapped with a period of more and more concentration, and diminishing competition, in the airline industry.

Now, Biden defenders will say he’s been great on airline competition because he stopped a proposed takeover of Spirit by Jet Blue. But that’s the only thing the Biden administration seems to have done on airline consolidation and, well, it hasn’t made things better for people traveling in and out of Ohio. The state is still getting shortchanged by the big four airlines where air travel is concerned.

We did a little searching using Orbitz and the Southwest Airlines site to see how difficult getting a direct flight into Ohio cities is, compared to getting a direct flight into Pittsburgh. It’s worth noting here that Columbus, Cincinnati and Cleveland all have bigger populations as cities than Pittsburgh does (2023 estimated populations of 913,175 (Columbus), 362,656 (Cleveland), 311,097 (Cincinnati) compared to 303,255 (Pittsburgh)). The estimated population of the Pittsburgh metropolitan area as of 2022 was bigger, though not vastly compared to Cincinnati (2,432,532 (Pittsburgh); 2,258,625 (Cincinnati); 2,162,066 (Columbus); 2,160,701 (Cleveland)).

Here’s what we found. The short version: Pittsburgh is getting more service overall from airlines. Yellow on the chart shows the highest number in each category.

62.5 percent of the time, Pittsburgh beats or ties Ohio airports.

It’s also worth noting that since Columbus is a state capital and Pittsburgh is not, it’s not surprising that Columbus might eke out an extra one flight a day over Pittsburgh where flights from the nation’s capital are concerned.

Airlines will argue that they analyze the data, and they run exactly the number of flights between cities that the data justifies– and probably also that Ohio is just not as big a hub of economic activity that it used to be, so there’s less demand for business travel, especially.
Maybe. Or maybe there’s a chicken-and-egg situation here. If it’s tough for business travelers to get into a given state or region or metropolitan area– and it most definitely is if there just aren’t a lot of direct flights– it’s likely that economic activity in that state, region or metropolitan area is going to stagnate or decline. The bottom line is that in an economy where the tech industry is booming, tech industry hubs (San Francisco and Austin) are originating more flights to Pittsburgh. And it’s especially noticeable with the San Francisco flight data.
One final point, looping back to that “Blocking the Jet Blue takeover of Spirit was good for competition” point. Sure, having five big airlines instead of four probably doesn’t do much to spur competition, and might even make things less competitive.
However, there’s some data that points to the blocking of that deal in the absence of other actions to address oligopolies in the airline sector being bad. This Quartz piece suggests Jet Blue and Frontier (smaller airlines) will benefit most from the deal being blocked, and Spirit having gone bust (a direct result). But when you look at Quartz’s available seat mile system-wide overlap chart, you’ll see there’s lots of overlap between Spirit and Southwest, American, Delta, and United– so those big four airlines will probably get bigger and more powerful and more able to cut routes and hubs as a result of the whole Spirit situation.
All this as Americans have sustained a 29% increase in fares at major airports since 2021 (the cumulative rate of inflation since 2021 has been about half that number).
It’s likely that JD Vance, with his tech world ties and Cincinnati base, has already noted this– as has still-Senator-for-a-few-weeks Sherrod Brown, who flies in and out of Cleveland (dead last for direct flights out of Washington, DC).
But has Bernie Moreno? Or whoever will be filling Vance’s shoes– until a special election occurs and is decided, and indeed thereafter? Is Mike DeWine paying attention here?

Related Stories: