What Took the Air Out of MSP-Chicago?
A businessperson looking to fly today might be astonished at the decline of what was once the Twin Cities’ prestige air corridor: MSP-Chicago. Sure, you can still fly to O’Hare and Midway (it now takes nearly two hours, though remains the same distance); but there are half as many flights as a couple decades ago, it’s an even bet you’ll be in a cramped regional jet departing from a far-flung gate, and you’ll learn the flight is too short for a beverage service. It’s also likely to cost you two to three times what it costs to fly to places like Denver or Philly. The era of our very own “shuttle” route is gone.
A retired Northwest C-suite exec who TCB spoke to reminisced that in 1993–94 the airline even built a skyway from the MSP T1 parking ramp directly into then-Gold Concourse gate 7, where all O’Hare flights departed from. Known as Fastrak, O’Hare flyers could park, walk in, and clear security opposite their gate.
“But it didn’t work,” the exec notes. “There were not enough people, the market’s not big enough.”
Not to mention “the fax machine, PDFs, video conferencing.” That’s Joe Brancatelli, the New York-based dean of America’s business travel journalists, who operates joesentme.com, a website for business travelers.
TCB showed the data to Jude Bricker, recently merged out of a job as CEO of Sun Country Air. “That’s amazing,” he noted. “Seats are down, traffic is down, cut about in half.” He observed that United and Southwest’s capacity was stable, but American was operating at a third of historic capacity and Delta was “way, way off.”
MSP-Chicago 2005
MDW: 16 flights (0 regional jets); American Trans Air, Northwest
ORD: 32 flights (6 regional jets); American, Northwest, United
MSP-Chicago 2026
MDW: 7 flights (3 regional jets); Delta, Southwest
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ORD: 20 flights (3 regional jets); American, Delta, Southwest, Sun Country
Bricker pinned it on mergers and consolidation. “It’s not profitable to source traffic out of MSP for American and United, and O’Hare is capacity-constrained,” he notes.
The former Northwest exec attributes some of the 2005 exuberance to competition, but fundamentally believes demand is now right-sized: “Minneapolis and Chicago are not what you’d candidly call thriving business centers today, in my mind.” And airline economics have changed. “All your classic shuttle markets are short-haul, and that’s now your highest cost structure,” he said. “Look at the NYC shuttles, they’re gone too.”
Amtrak has taken a huge bite of shuttle markets on the East Coast and L.A–San Diego, but its two MSP-Chicago trains are not marketed to a business traveler. They operate at freeway speeds, sans wifi. Here in flyover land, it’s a regional jet at gate C19 or 420 miles on I-90/94, with a guaranteed hour-long traffic jam beginning right when you pass, well, O’Hare.
