Norwegian is an airline that is not waiting for the US to approve its plans. Yesterday the airline launched service between New York and the French Caribbean. Today its Baltimore’s turn. Boston is also part of this new service.
The airline is using new 787-800s to serve these markets. Starting in winter is smart, already residents of these three US cities are feeling a nip in the air. The picture above is going to speak loudly come January.
The creativity of this service is something we have mentioned before. But it deserves mention again. The air travel world is ever more global. Airlines can do clever things to get around barriers. The ME3 have shown how to grow quickly in an industry that certainly did not celebrate their emergence.  That is on the high end of the industry spectrum. Now we have clever moves by an airline delivering longhaul LCC services – with free WiFi – at the low end.
Who’s squeezed in the middle? The network airlines. Typical reaction from the US network airlines is to complain to government. US airlines have proven their ability to compete with each other vigorously. But that was long ago, when we had characters like Herb Kelleher, Robert Crandall and Stephen Wolf that made this industry fascinating. Now we have a cozy oligopoly where nobody rocks the boat.
Which is why one has to cheer the new Norwegian service. And also cheer the service levels offered by the ME3 and their growing footprint in the US. How else can one get the US airline industry to get its creative and competitive mojo back?
It’s really neat that Norwegian uses the fact that Martinique and Guadeloupe are officially actually parts of the European Union to offer these services from the U.S., under the U.S.-EU Open Skies air services multilateral agreement. It’s even more interesting that although Norway itself isn’t in the European Union, Norwegian gets to use the advantages of the U.S.-EU agreement (and can fly anywhere it wants within the EU too) because Norway Is a member of the European Economic Area, which is closely affiliated with the EU.
Thanks for explaining it. I was wondering how Norwegian could be doing this without US authorization