United Airlines is reviving and old scheduling idea—’tag flights’—to serve new destinations in Asia without adding extra planes.
Instead, it’s assigning planes with morning arrivals in Hong Kong from the U.S. west coast to round-trip routes from there to Ho Chi Minh City and Bangkok. The schedules will have them back in Hong Kong in time for their red-eye returns to the U.S. They’re called tag flights because the routes play tag with each other’s schedules.
United has also recently added tag flights from Tokyo to Mongolia, Taiwan and the Philippines.
United used to have a network of intra-Asia tag flights, but pulled them years ago; those flights used a fleet of planes based in Asia, and did not generate enough business for that to pay; the new flights take advantage of idle planes instead.
