The busiest domestic route in the US wasn't on the mainland. See the top 10.

Fri, 12/29/2023 - 05:01

A Hawaiian Airlines Boeing 717 at Maui airport in Hawaii. — Hawaiian Airlines mostly flies the Boeing 717 between Oahu and Maui.
Taylor Rains/Insider

Travel data provider OAG revealed its 2023 list of the top 10 busiest US domestic flight routes.
An interisland flight in Hawaii took the No. 1 spot after not making the list in 2019.
Business corridors like those between Los Angeles and San Francisco and New York made the top 10.

Travel data provider OAG recently revealed the busiest domestic flight routes in the US for 2023, based on available airline seats — and a short interisland hop in Hawaii took the top spot.

With a typical flight time of only about 20 minutes, the route between Daniel K. Inouye International Airport in Honolulu and Kahului Airport in Maui was the busiest in all of the US this year, with 3.6 million available seats, according to OAG data.

The nonstop route is served by Hawaiian Airlines and Southwest Airlines, with planes leaving nearly every hour. Southwest entering the market in the spring of 2019 helped boost the Oahu-Maui route, which, according to OAG, was not in the top 10 pre-pandemic.

According to Cirium data, Hawaiian operated some 17,000 flights between the two islands in 2023, and Southwest contributed about 8,000 — up from the 2,000 it was flying in 2019.

The route between Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport and Orlando International Airport was the second-busiest US route in 2023, with about 3.5 million seats.

Atlanta, which is consistently named the busiest airport in the world, showed up twice more on the list with its routes to Fort Lauderdale and New York.

Other top destinations included both business and tourist hot spots, like Las Vegas, Denver, San Francisco, and Chicago. Here's a closer look at the top 10 busiest domestic routes in the US for 2023, according to OAG.