Delta drops final 2 transcon routes from New York LaGuardia, shortest flight from Miami

December 11, 2023

Delta Air Lines seemingly wasn’t successful in its coast-to-coast missions from New York’s most convenient airport.

The carrier filed plans over the weekend to drop its last two remaining transcontinental routes from its hub at New York’s LaGuardia Airport (LGA), as first seen in Cirium schedules and later confirmed by a carrier spokesperson.

Specifically, Delta will cease flying between LGA and Las Vegas on Feb. 24, 2024, and Salt Lake City on March 30, 2024. The airline had previously only flown these routes on Saturdays with just one frequency in each direction.

Want more airline-specific news? Sign up for TPG’s free biweekly Aviation newsletter.

These two cuts come less than a month after Delta slashed its two other transcontinental routes from LGA, which served Los Angeles and Phoenix.

Interestingly, Delta announced all four of these coast-to-coast routes in June, so this about-face comes less than six months after the airline’s network planning team thought these flights might’ve been successful.

That said, many aviation observers thought that these flights were doomed from the start.

That’s because of LaGuardia’s “perimeter rule,” which restricts airlines from flying to airports farther than 1,500 miles away with just two exceptions: routes to Denver and any flight operated on Saturdays.

Saturday-only service isn’t typically all that lucrative, especially for domestic routes. Saturdays are usually the quietest day of the week to fly, and with nearly no business travel demand, airlines must compete for their share of the leisure market traveling during the weekend — a segment that historically hasn’t been all that profitable for airlines.

(LaGuardia is also slot-constrained, meaning that airlines need special takeoff and landing permissions to operate flights there, but slots are not needed for flights on Saturdays.)

Over the years, Delta and its competitors have tried these once-weekly flights without much success. The airline last flew from LGA to Las Vegas in 2006 and to Salt Lake City in 2010, Cirium schedules show. In 2019, the carrier experimented with serving Bozeman on Saturdays from LaGuardia. This service to a smaller, more popular, leisure-focused city didn’t survive more than a single summer season.

ZACH GRIFF/THE POINTS GUY

During the pandemic, Spirit Airlines launched a 2,469-mile transcontinental route from LaGuardia to Los Angeles, but that service has since been cut.

Without these transcon flights, Delta’s new longest route from LaGuardia will become its daily service to Denver (the only exemption to the airport’s perimeter rule).

While Delta might be cutting its longest route from New York, it’s doing exactly the opposite in Miami, where it’s slashing its shortest route.

The carrier launched daily, year-round flights from Miami to Nassau in the Bahamas in November, but now this 183-mile service is being cut after just three months. Delta’s final flight from Miami to Nassau will take off on Jan. 31, 2024.

Though Miami isn’t a hub for Delta, it’s slowly becoming a key gateway city for the airline. That’s thanks to Delta’s joint venture partnership with LATAM, the South American juggernaut, which was announced in 2019.

As part of Delta’s investment in LATAM, the airlines are building a strategic alliance, boosting flights in key U.S. gateway airports — such as Miami — to Latin America.

Delta has said that Miami will become a so-called “gateway hub,” but it’ll have one less flight starting in January.