Narita International Airport

Next one,

and this is the one that makes me angry, the Narita Shinkansen.

Japan builds a high-speed rail network in the 60s and 70s, the Shinkansen, the bullet train, and then they build their new international airport at Narita, 40 miles outside Tokyo, and they planned a Shinkansen line to connect the two.

Straightforward, obvious, the kind of

thing Japan does better than anyone.

Land acquisition battles with farmers and residents dragged on for decades.

The project was formally abandoned in the 1980s.

Narita remains one of the least conveniently located major airports in the developed world.

And so when we wanted to buy our flights to Japan, which was on a weekday, logged in in the morning, I knew I was only gonna get two seats each flight.

So I bought two seats from San Francisco to Narita and two seats from San Francisco to Haneda, the other airport in Tokyo, and my wife and I just agreed we're gonna split up.

Each of us will take one kid, and I volunteered to take the kid that we thought would be the harder kid on the flight.

[laughs]

So, like, my theory and logic, whether you're booking for one or five, however many people, is book something that is enough to lock the trip in, and then see what happens.

And I'll give another example.

But when we went to book the return flight, I log in and I search SFO, or Narita to SFO.

Nothing.

And so I bought it and I had it, I was hand carrying it into Japan.

And it was in my hand standing next to Paul at the custom in customs at Narita airport when he got busted.

Oh my

gosh.

From there, they can fly nonstop to all of United's mainland hubs.

Another connecting point for travelers from Guam is through Tokyo Narita, where they can con- where they can connect to most of United's hubs as well as Cebu in the Philippines and Kaohsiung, Taiwan.

Guam is not a major transit hub, nor does it have a population and economy to support the volume of flights seen in other United hubs.

While travelers do connect from Honolulu to Manila or Palau via Guam, the island mostly serves O&D, which is origin and destination traffic, such as the Japanese tourism market to Guam.