United may have bowed out, but American Airlines and Air Canada are expanding their use of buses to reach smaller regional airports near their hubs.
American, which already serves several cities with flights from its Philadelphia hub, is adding ‘flights’ from Chicago O’Hare to South Bend International Airport in Indiana and Rockford International Airport in Chicago starting in October. There will be four trips a day for SBN and five for RFD. The Chicago connections, like those in Philadelpha, are ‘tarmac-to-tarmac,’ meaning that passengers check bags and go through security at the originating smaller airport and are then delivered to an airside entrance at the larger hub.
Air Canada’s new service will be the company’s third from Toronto Pearson, this one going to Kingston, Ontario.
Landline, which provides the airline-branded buses, has its own base in Colorado, where it formerly also operated two routes for United, which have now been dropped, although the bus company will still serve those routes independently. The airline connection, company officials say, didn’t work out because it couldn’t be ‘tarmac-to-tarmac,’ and therefore involved two check-ins and extra security.
