I often get the following question: “Does it make sense to pick one airline and stick to it, or should I just pick the cheapest/best option depending on my itinerary?”

Well, it depends on a few different factors. Let’s dive into these one-by-one:

1. Do you live in a hub?
2. How much do you travel?
3. Where do you travel to?
4. Do you travel for work, personal, or both?

Do you live in a hub, what is a hub?

In my mind, the first and most important consideration when determining the answer to this question is whether you live in a hub city or not. What is a hub?  A hub is simply a city or airport where airlines concentrate their operations. Depending on the size of the city, airports can either be dominated by one airline or sometimes multiple. For example, in the cities of Atlanta, Minneapolis, and Salt Lake City, Delta Airlines is the dominant player and has 70%+ of the marketshare at each of these airports. However, in Los Angeles, Delta has about 20% marketshare, American and United both have about 15% marketshare each, and Southwest has about 10% marketshare. The big three legacy US carriers: Delta, American, and United all call consider LAX to be a hub city for them. And while Southwest doesn’t have traditional hubs, they consider LAX to be a “focus city”. So- if you live in ATL, MSP, or SLC you are more or less “defaulted” into primarily flying Delta, while if you live in Los Angeles you have an array of options.

To recap the first point- do you live in a city where one airline dominates the market? Do you live in a city that is a hub for multiple airlines? Or, do you live in a city that is not a hub for any airline?

If you live in a city that is a hub for either one or multiple airlines, you should consider being loyal to one. If you live in a smaller city that is not a hub for any of the airlines, you are usually better off picking the cheapest or most desired option.

Secondly, how much do you travel?

If you only travel a few times of year, there is less of a case to be made for being loyal to an airline because you likely won’t get much value from the perks that come from airline loyalty.

Third, where do you travel to?

This is an important consideration, especially if you travel internationally. Not all airlines serve the same cities, countries, or regions of the world equally. For example, if you live in a city like Chicago where United Airlines has a hub at O’Hare Airport and where Southwest calls Midway Airport a focus airport, it would not make sense to pour all of your loyalty into Southwest if you travel internationally a lot to Europe and/or Asia.  This is because Southwest does not fly to Europe or Asia.

Airline alliances like Star Alliance, Oneworld, and SkyTeam are a topic for another post, but if you travel internationally these are important to understand and may sway your airline loyalty decision in one way or another.

Fourth, do you travel for work, personal, or both?

If you fly for work, you should consider being loyal to an airline because you can get a huge head start toward airline status. Now, this of course also depends on where you fly for work and whether or not the same airline serves both your work and leisure destinations equally well. The best case scenario is that you can build your way toward status with an airline on your company’s dime, and then also reap the status perks for personal use. This is completely legal, normal, and millions of people do this.

Finally, let’s look at what benefits you can reap by being loyal to an airline. What’s the whole point you might ask?

By being loyal to one airline, over time you can earn perks that will save you money and that would otherwise sometimes cost thousands of extra dollars if you paid for them out of pocket.

Examples of perks that come from being loyal to an airline:

• Lounge access
• Priority boarding
• Priority check-in and skipping the line to check your bags
• Complimentary seat upgrades to first or business class
• Access to free seat selection in a higher class when buying a regular economy ticket
• Free checked bags
• Checked bags that come out before everyone else’s
• Discounted or free in-flight WiFi
• Discounted in-flight food purchases

While some of these topics deserve individual posts of themselves, hopefully this was a good overview for you to consider whether you should be loyal to an airline or not. Feel free to reach out to us @ support@theskykey.com if you ever have any individual questions or would like advice on this topic; we love helping fellow travelers experience travel in a better way!

Thank you for reading!

-Jacob Goldberg
Co-Founder @ The Sky Key