Delta Is Going Back to a Town It Walked Away From in 2008

Delta will resume flying to Monterey Regional Airport on 19 December, ending an absence of nearly 19 years. The airline last operated regular service to the Central Coast airport in January 2008, in the run-up to a recession that stripped regional flying out of dozens of small American markets and, in most cases, never gave it back. Monterey is one of the few that is getting it back, and it is arriving with three departures a day rather than the single token frequency that usually marks a cautious re-entry.

The schedule is twice-daily service to Los Angeles and a single daily round trip to Salt Lake City, all flown by SkyWest as Delta Connection using Embraer 175 aircraft. That aircraft choice matters more than it sounds. The E175 has a genuine first class cabin and a proper overhead bin, which makes a small-airport route viable for the premium traveller in a way the 50-seat regional jets of the late 2000s never did. Two Delta hubs from a runway that currently offers very few of them is a meaningful change in connectivity.

Monterey sits in an awkward spot on the map: close enough to San Jose and San Francisco that airlines have long assumed travellers will drive, far enough that the drive is a genuine chore, particularly southbound on a Friday. The catchment includes Carmel, Big Sur, Pebble Beach and the Salinas Valley, which is a mix of leisure demand at the very top of the market and agricultural business travel that does not show up in headline tourism numbers but flies consistently.

The route is part of a wider Los Angeles build-up Delta announced the same week, which the airline has described as its largest ever schedule at LAX. Adding Monterey is the small, human end of that plan, and it is the kind of route that tends to prove out or fail within two seasons. Anyone who has been driving to San Jose to fly should look at December fares before assuming the nonstop carries a premium; new regional routes usually launch priced to fill.

Sources: The Points Guy, AeroRoutes