Geneva-New York on Swiss: the beginning of the end?

24 hours before our scheduled return to Gstaad from New York, we received a text message. It read simply:

SWISS: LX23 NEW YORK JFK TO GENEVA NOVEMBER 9 CANCELLED. PLEASE CALL SWISS OR YOUR TRAVEL AGENT. WE APOLOGIZE FOR THE INCONVENIENCE.

Puzzled, we called Swiss. We learned that our direct flight from New York’s JFK airport to Geneva had been canceled and that we had been rebooked onto a flight leaving two hours later to Zurich with a connecting flight onto Geneva. When asked why, the agent simply said they didn’t have a plane. We were about to make a snarky comment speculating on the notion that if airlines didn’t have access to planes, then who does, but we held back. At the airport the next day, the check-in areas were teeming with frustrated-looking people forced to stay in New York two hours longer than they wanted to, and now forced to fly to a city they didn’t plan to go to. When we asked around, we found that most didn’t know in advance of the Geneva cancellation, and the lines at the ticket counter for re-booking were long.

We asked a supervisor about why the flight had been canceled and he gave a slightly different version of the mechanical-problem-with-the-plane-story, but this time we pushed it. First we asked if the flight was full, to which we were told fully-booked, as a result of of the Geneva cancellation. He said we were lucky because the Zurich flight had only been half full and therefore able to accommodate the people from the half full Geneva flight. Ah ha! How convenient. Then we challenged the mechanical problem story, suggesting that 24 hours should have been more than enough time to find another plane, at which point he started twisting himself in all sorts of mumbo jumbo about the landing gear on the previous night’s incoming flight. Whatever. It’s an open secret that some Swiss brass want to gradually surrender Geneva (to easyJet) and concentrate operations in Zurich. What better way to let everyone sample Zurich airport that to force everyone to fly there? Perhaps it won’t be long till we see the Geneva-New York direct route become a twice weekly instead of daily affair, or go the way of other intercontinental routes on Swiss and get canceled altogether (especially now they’re in the Star Alliance). Have any of you had an experience like this? Do any of our readers have knowledge of commercial airline flight operations to speculate on whether this episode could have been a less than well-disguised attempt to economize by combining two low passenger loads onto one flight? Please click "Comments" below to let us know.