It all depends on the ability to fill your plane with passengers. Full planes means high fuel efficiency and low costs.
It is much easier to get full planes with high frequency departures on a hub model than it is on a point to point model. Generally people don't like connections, so their propensity to buy is much lower if there is a competing direct flight available. There is a balance to be made, but generally speaking a point to point route is only more efficient if the passenger volume is extremely high and very predictable.
A lot of people, though, are confusing the recent availability of new international direct flights with a move towards a point to point model. This is completely false. The increase in "direct" flights has to do with the expansion of hubs and airlines. For example, if you go to the SeaTac airport [0] has a higher number of direct international routes than it ever has, but every single one of them has a hub for that airline at the origin or the destination. You have more direct flights not because the airlines are operating point to point routes, but because you have more hubs and more airlines.
Only regionally has point to point made more traction, but that is an irrelevant discussion when talking about the widebody market.
>A lot of people, though, are confusing the recent availability of new international direct flights with a move towards a point to point model. This is completely false. The increase in "direct" flights has to do with the expansion of hubs and airlines.
I think that's an example of using a absolutist definition of "point-to-point" instead of a relative definition.
When airline industry analysts talk about 787 servicing more point-to-point routes, the "point-to-point" is relative to avoiding the mega hubs with 4-engine jumbo planes.
Yes, there can be a so-called "point-to-point" at a 2nd-tier airport flying to another 2nd-tier airport (that also has "hub&spoke" like attributes) which makes it fail the absolutist definition of "point-to-point". We can concede that more restrictive definition and yet still simultaneously understand what the industry is talking about when they mention "point-to-point". The expansion of 2nd-tier hubs at budget airlines is still point-to-point compared to superhubs like New York JFK, London LHR, Paris CDG, etc.
It does matter though. Let's take the example from your other post: Oslo to Orlando.
Demand from Orlando to Oslo and vice versa would never have been enough to be viable if Oslo wasn't a hub connecting dozens of european cities to dozens of american cities. The demand of Orlando residents wanting to see Oslo and Oslo residents wanting to see Orlando is only a tiny fraction of what actually flies on that route.
To the customer, it doesn't matter...you have more direct routes. To the airline and fleet planners, it absolutely matters. Because they have to predict the demand to fly on those routes and they have to plan the volumes and connection timings at their hubs. The ETOPS rule, while not insiginificant, isn't as significant as you claim. The difficulty in filling a 747 isn't much different from a 787, and in no way did the prior rule force a 3 span dual megahub route instead of a direct flight in order to fill a plane with 25% more passengers.
>Oslo wasn't a hub connecting dozens of european cities
You're explaining more facts which we can all agree on. Yes Oslo can also act as a mini "hub".
My comment was about language and the evolution of how "point-to-point" is used to also describe 2nd-tier "hub" traffic. For some reason, "point-to-point" gained currency to also describe traffic outside of superhubs even if the majority of passengers are not native residents of the 2nd-tier airports. In this way, it can be a misleading term based on actual passenger demographics but it's the term that's already in wide use.
To add to the relativism, to a rich guy with his own jet or fractional ownership NetJets, none of the commercial airlines are actually "point-to-point" because they don't fly to the tiny executive airport that's 2 miles from his office.
So let's say we banish "point-to-point" and rewrite A380 headlines as "Airbus A380 lost because of the rise of non-superhub to non-superhub traffic". Does that materially change anything about the incorrect market assumptions that Airbus made?
Yeah, the language is pretty overloaded from the layman's perspective. In the airline industry (which I'm not a part of, but I have significant professional connections with operations researchers which do route planning for the airline industry), they distinguish between a point-to-point route and a direct route.
Direct means you fulfill the customer's desire with one flight, irrespective of whether there is a hub at the origin or destination, although most are to or from a hub. That is why airlines advertise direct routes. Despite their marketing as direct routes, typically fewer than 10% of passengers on that flight will share the same origin and destination.
Point to point means a route that doesn't connect between a hub and a spoke, neither of which has full scale maintenance operations and significant staffing for that airline. It is also expected that 100% of passengers on the flight are coming from the same origin and to the same destination.
All point-to-point routes are direct routes, but not vice versa. For example, when I fly from Seattle to San Jose on southwest, I'm flying on a direct route, but I'm also flying a point to point route, because neither Seattle or San Jose are hubs for Southwest. It actually takes a lot of volume for an actual point to point route to make sense, and in this case it does because of the significant business ties between Silicon Valley and Seattle. But when I fly Seattle to Oakland, it is only a direct route, because Oakland happens to be a hub.
> So let's [...] rewrite A380 headlines as "Airbus A380 lost because of the rise of non-superhub to non-superhub traffic". Does that materially change anything about the incorrect market assumptions that Airbus made?
In the sense of the magnitude of how bad that decision was, it matters: it made it doubly bad for airbus. Because even between superhubs, they're now running A350's, 777s, and 787s.
The A380 only made sense at superhubs because of constrained takeoff and landing slots. Those slots have a non-linear value: an airpoint at 99% capacity may charge 10x more for a takeoff or landing slot than an airport at 95% capacity. So if I'm running American Airlines between JFK and Heathrow, an A380 may make sense, but if 10% of the competing airline volume on that route switches to LaGuardia and/or Gatwick, it no longer makes sense for me to run an A380...even though my network map hasn't changed at all. So airbus even lost out even on the airlines that never changed with the times.
It is much easier to get full planes with high frequency departures on a hub model than it is on a point to point model. Generally people don't like connections, so their propensity to buy is much lower if there is a competing direct flight available. There is a balance to be made, but generally speaking a point to point route is only more efficient if the passenger volume is extremely high and very predictable.
A lot of people, though, are confusing the recent availability of new international direct flights with a move towards a point to point model. This is completely false. The increase in "direct" flights has to do with the expansion of hubs and airlines. For example, if you go to the SeaTac airport [0] has a higher number of direct international routes than it ever has, but every single one of them has a hub for that airline at the origin or the destination. You have more direct flights not because the airlines are operating point to point routes, but because you have more hubs and more airlines.
Only regionally has point to point made more traction, but that is an irrelevant discussion when talking about the widebody market.
[0] http://www.portseattle.org/Sea-Tac/Flights-Airlines/Route-Ma...