If you’re bemoaning the slow slide into fall and are already looking forward to planning your next vacation, you now have more options: On Thursday, United Airlines announced new service to Nice, France, Palermo, Italy, and Curaçao, a Dutch Caribbean island. All three flights will be offered from the Chicago-based airline’s hub in Newark.
Service to Curaçao begins first, starting on December 7 as seasonal winter service with flights every Saturday. On May 2, 2020, the airline will begin flying once a day from Newark to Nice, the so-called gateway to the French Riviera. Weeks later, on May 20, United will start offering daily nonstops to Palermo, Sicily’s capital, making it the only airline to do so. All routes are pending government approval.
These are hardly the only international moves United is making. The carrier is also extending seasonal service between Newark and Athens, Greece, Naples, Italy, and Porto, Portugal; and between Washington, D.C. and Barcelona, Spain. On December 15 of this year, it will kick off the first-ever nonstop service between Newark and Cape Town, South Africa.
For fliers not on the East Coast, there’s good news for you, too: As of November 1, 2019, United will expand service between Denver and London to year-round, and on December 5, 2019, it will start year-round service between San Francisco International Airport and New Delhi. From Chicago O’Hare, daily year-round service to Zurich starts on March 28, 2020.
With the announcement, United is on the heels of Big Three competitor American, which announced its own spate of “swoon-worthy” routes this August, wrote AFAR’s Michelle Baran: Three new nonstop flights out of Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport to Eastern Europe in May 2020 and a new nonstop flight from Philadelphia to Casablanca, Morocco, in June 2020—the carrier’s first time flying to Africa.
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