Delta moves to cash in on Chinese middle-class travelers

Delta Air Lines, the second-busiest commercial air carrier at McCarran International Airport, has adopted an aggressive West Coast strategy to cash in on the growing number of Chinese middle-class travelers.

That could bode well for Southern Nevada tourism as local airline development planners watch to see how the Delta strategy plays out.

Atlanta-based Delta, which has 311 Las Vegas flights a week to and from nine destinations, is expanding rapidly on the West Coast, particularly in Seattle, according to a report issued by OAG, a British company that analyzes airline logistics.

At the same time, Delta has new aircraft in its acquisition pipeline to replace its aging Boeing 747 and 767 long-range, wide-bodied jets. The airline will take delivery of the first of 50 Airbus A350 jets, which are more fuel-efficient than existing planes, by the second quarter of 2017.

Not only will the Airbus jets be more efficient to operate, but they will have greater range than the existing fleet.

"The farther west you are in Asia, the fewer opportunities there are," said John Grant, executive vice president of OAG, formerly known as the Official Airline Guide.

In the past two years, Delta has nailed down operations between Seattle and the five busiest Asian markets, Tokyo's Narita International Airport, Hong Kong, Beijing, Shanghai in China and Seoul, South Korea.

To support the flow of Asian traffic, the airline has beefed up capacity to domestic destinations in Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles International Airport and Portland, Ore.

According to Grant, Delta has grown capacity by 35 percent in Seattle, 27 percent in Portland, 20 percent in Los Angeles and 7 percent in San Francisco since July 2014.

A slice of that benefits Las Vegas, which has 54 weekly nonstop round trips to and from Los Angeles and 34 a week to and from Seattle.

Rise in traffic from Seattle

In Seattle, Delta is in a market-share fight with Seattle-based Alaska Airlines, Seattle-Tacoma International Airport's market leader, which operates half of the 122 weekly flights between Seattle and Las Vegas in a three-way battle with Southwest Airlines.

While Alaska and Southwest fly Boeing 737 jets on the route, Delta uses Embraer 175 and CRJ 700 jets. Delta offers two classes of service on its flights, but there are just 76 seats on the Embraer planes and 65 on the CRJ 700s.

"We've seen traffic grow incrementally from Seattle since May 2014," said Brig Lawson, director of business partnerships with the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority.

At the end of the fourth quarter in 2013, Delta showed an average 35 passengers a day passing through Seattle to Las Vegas from Asia. Now, the average is at 158 a day.

Lawson said the Japanese market to Las Vegas has been flat over the years, but other Asian markets have heated up, particularly in China, mostly as a result of a middle-class customer who now has the means to travel abroad.

Those are the customers the Convention and Visitors Authority is trying to attract to Southern Nevada because they tend to stay longer and spend more.

While international traffic has grown substantially at McCarran after the opening of Terminal 3 in 2012, Asia has always been the weak link.

Traffic has grown the most from Mexico and Canada, and Europe has seen success with Virgin Atlantic, British Airways and several niche subsidiary carriers like Condor and Edelweiss.

Latin America has been a success story in 2013 and 2014, thanks to Panama-based Copa Airlines, but cooling South American economies have limited growth more recently.

But Asia has been a different story.

The steadiest carrier in recent years has been Korean Air, which began nonstop flights between Las Vegas and Seoul in 2008 but cut them back at the peak of the recession, resuming its full schedule in 2011.

But there is a list of carriers that tried and failed nonstop routes from Asia to McCarran: Japan Airlines from Tokyo, Singapore Airlines from Hong Kong, and Philippine Airlines from Manila, via Vancouver, British Columbia.

The first company to try nonstops to Las Vegas from Asia was a Delta predecessor, Northwest Airlines, in 1998. Delta acquired Northwest in 2008.

Shortly after Northwest inaugurated Las Vegas service from Tokyo, Japan Airlines entered the market and competed with Northwest. But there simply weren't enough customers to support both carriers on the route at the time, and Northwest withdrew.

It wasn't long after that that Japan Airlines suffered a financial crisis and also ended flying to Las Vegas.

Fighting the stigma of failure

The stigma of that failure has frightened other airlines from giving Asian routes a try.

"The thing was, it wasn't a Las Vegas issue, it was a JAL (Japan Airlines) issue," Lawson said. "The load factors were good, and people were happy with the service. It was a unique circumstance for a company like that to struggle financially."

Lawson said Tokyo is one of the world's largest unserved markets for Las Vegas. When he and colleagues from McCarran meet with Asian airline executives to encourage them to offer flights, the Japan Airlines failure frequently comes up, and the Las Vegas contingent works to re-educate the decision-makers.

The Convention and Visitors Authority and McCarran have always been strong advocates for nonstop flights from overseas, hoping that travelers will come to Las Vegas first, then take excursions to California and the Southwest.

They know Delta won't fly nonstops to Las Vegas because the network of hub airports has been a staple of the successful hub-and-spoke legacy air carriers.

Lawson said Las Vegas doesn't play one airline off another because they don't have to.

"These executives are smart, and they know their networks and those of their competitors," Lawson said. "We don't have to explain the benefits of flying directly into McCarran. They already know them."

Instead, it's just a matter of selling an airline on Las Vegas by emphasizing the popularity of the market and how business travel — the most expensive seats on the plane — are growing as a result of the city's convention industry.

And that may be a little harder to do with Delta Air Lines' West Coast expansion.

Contact reporter Richard N. Velotta at rvelotta@reviewjournal.com or 702-477-3893. Find @RickVelotta on Twitter.