By Alison Sider

If you've ever spun a globe and thought about jumping on a plane to whatever city your finger landed on, you'll probably be jealous of Patrick Quayle.

As senior vice president of global network planning and alliances at United Airlines, it's his job to figure out where the next travel hot spots will be. And United has been more adventurous than most.

In recent years, United has added nonstop flights to destinations like Marrakesh, Morocco, and Palma de Mallorca, Spain. In May the airline launched flights from Tokyo to Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, and in June will begin flying from Newark to Nuuk, Greenland -- both destinations that are firsts for a U.S. airline. Later this year, it will start offering flights from the U.S. connecting via Hong Kong to Bangkok and Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam (and yes, Quayle gets to ride along on the inaugural flights).

Quayle talked with the Journal about how the airline thinks 10 years ahead to predict the future of travel, poring over government-demand figures and credit-card spending data, while keeping a close watch over Instagram trends and the latest streaming hits.

How do you come up with destinations like Ulaanbaatar or Nuuk? What kinds of data are you looking at that convinces you those are places that people actually want to go to?

This process has evolved. Adding a flight to a London or a Frankfurt is low risk and very easy, because there's so much data and the market is so saturated.

When it gets to a place like Greenland or Mongolia, we're looking at what is trending, or we're looking at how do we capture the imagination of the United customer base.

In a place like Greenland, we're making a bet that people want to go there based on the type of travel we see to other parts of our network that are more exotic, more off the beaten path. In a place like Mongolia, there actually has been air service in the past -- not from a U.S. airline -- but there's been air service in the past from Tokyo to Mongolia, and we can see the traffic demands going there.

I wouldn't have expected, when the route was announced, that Greenland would suddenly be in the political conversation.

Nor did I. We announced it in September. It was an adventure travel, you know, go see this beautiful, untouched part of the earth. And subsequently, politics has come into play. And so it has been in the news a lot. I would just say, people are very interested in Greenland. And I think us having a nonstop flight there just makes it easier for cultures and ideas to exchange in the free flow of information.

Have destinations caught on that you guys are maybe open to places that other U.S. airlines wouldn't consider? Do they try to pitch you?

Absolutely. Destinations pitch United, because they see the type of content we're adding.

But also, our team is very creative. We're looking at what's trending on Instagram. We're looking at where people are searching on United.com. We're looking at top travel trends. We see a spike in interest in Bangkok because of "White Lotus," and so we're capturing that with our new service to Bangkok, starting this October.

Is that how that came about, or was it just a happy accident?

It's a bit of both. We have had Bangkok in our long-term plan. We look at, where do we want to be five years from now? Where do we want to be 10 years from now? And we build out a fleet plan to support that. So we are buying aircraft from Boeing and Airbus to support our vision of where we want to be in five and 10 years.

At the same time, we also look at what's trending and maybe speed up some of these destinations or push back some of these destinations based on geopolitical events, or current events. We had [Bangkok] in our plans long before "White Lotus" ever announced they were filming in Thailand, but we sped it up because of the "White Lotus" effect.

You mentioned looking on Instagram. Can you talk a little bit more about what role social media plays in this research process?

Social media does play a role in the process: Where people are going, what is trending, what are hot destinations -- we try to get there in the future.

How has the process of picking routes, picking destinations and planning the network changed in recent years?

There's really not any new technology or new source of information. But what I would tell you that's quite transformational was our experience during Covid. We had to more or less shut the airline down to just a handful of routes that we were flying and then build it back up. Because the business demand had evaporated, we started experimenting a lot more, and adding things like Dubrovnik [Croatia] or Palma de Mallorca [Spain]. We said, people have not been able to travel for a couple of years. What are destinations that could excite them, that could inspire them and that could motivate them to travel? They did quite well.

That success led us to think, Well, gosh, if the flight to the Azores works, why not add a flight to Faro? Why not add a flight to Madeira?

What it taught us is that we should experiment more, and to try to look through the data and figure out, what are the key characteristics of a route that works.

How do you decide where not to fly? Something might be on your wish list, or sound really exciting, but it's just not gonna make the cut.

We are a publicly traded company, and we're here to make money, and so every flight we add we would like to make a profit on.

I'll give you two examples. We added Los Angeles to Singapore. We've also added New York/Newark to Bergen, Norway. After 12 months, these flights did not make money, and they were not on a path to make money, and we canceled the flight. In this role, you cannot be so egotistical or proud that you're unwilling to cancel a flight.

I've heard you describe network planning as sort of both an art and a science. Where does the science start and the art of it pick up?

The science starts with the data. We can look at credit-card data. We can look at U.S. Department of Transportation origin-and-destination data. We can look at pricing data. The art aspect of it is, how do I look at that same data and add a lens of creativity and add a lens of color and passion that could lead me to broaden the aperture and serve more people and add more destinations?

Any hints on what's next on your agenda, or what regions of the world you're focused on next?

I don't want to give any hints, because the other two big U.S. airlines copy what we do. If I hint at it, they'll be the first to launch it. I would rather be the first one.

Have you ever had a situation where you guys picked the routes, planning so far ahead, and then sentiment changed and you had to rethink destinations on the fly?

We have not had that problem. The problem we've had is we've picked routes, we've planned for routes, we've talked to cities, and then the aircraft are not delivered. And that's the challenge that we face more of. We are very, very dependent upon Boeing and Airbus to deliver the aircraft on time.

When you're not on inaugural flights, are you personally a big traveler?

I love travel. I definitely have a wanderlust to just explore and see the world, but I also like the simple things in life. I'm dreaming of going to South Africa. I want to go visit Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan. At the same time, I love nothing more than also going back to the Hill Country of Texas with my family and just spending a quiet weekend outside of San Antonio. It's being able to balance both of those things is kind of the cool part of this job.

Interview is edited and condensed.

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

June 04, 2025 20:00 ET (00:00 GMT)

Copyright (c) 2025 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.