After a year of much promotion and fanfare, United Airlines and several other airlines are now backing out of the new airport in Tulum in Mexico.
The new airport has been open for less than 12 months, but tourists are still using the airport in Cancun in record numbers.
United has scrapped one route altogether to the destination and amended two others to lower their respective frequencies. Specifically, United has dropped its route from Los Angeles to Tulum. It will also suspend flight from Newark Airport and Chicago next summer.
JetBlue Airways and American Airlines are also exiting the Tulum market. In the excitement of the new airport, the airlines had severely overestimated the popularity of the market.
In a statement, a United spokesperson said "we regularly adjust our schedule for a variety of reasons.”
One route that appears to be working is Houston to Tulum, and that will increase to twice daily service in the summer. Those changes will start on May 22. An American Airlines flight from Charlotte to the Mexican destination will be discontinued as well.
Brian Znotins, American's network chief, said that "the whole industry getting in there all at the same time was too much capacity to absorb all at once; we need to get people more familiar with Tulum — there are plenty of people familiar with Tulum, but we had way more seats than people familiar with Tulum, so you're seeing us and the whole industry scale back and take a step back a bit."
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