Icelandair will suspend its route to Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport as of January 2026. The news comes despite network increases elsewhere across the United States, but provides further evidence for the fact that travel between Europe and the United States has weakened in recent times. The last flight will operate on January 6, 2025.
Schedule filings submitted to aviation analytics firm Cirium shows that Icelandair will be ending service to Detroit. While the airline has not announced this themselves, Simple Flying has reached out for a comment. The airline was not immediately reachable for a response.
Icelandair Cuts Detroit
Credit: Edinburgh Airport
Detroit joined Icelandair’s network in 2023 and was a seasonal service. In 2024, it decided to extend the route beyond the summer season, ending in December instead. This was maintained for 2025, with the final flight operating in January 2026. Services beyond that have now been removed from its schedules. The route is also not bookable on its website anymore.
It flew up to five times weekly during the summer peaks, reducing back to three or four during the winter months. It operates using Boeing 737 MAX 8 equipment and is one of Icelandair’s longer routes with the type. It is its 14th longest route overall and takes around 6h 25 minutes to complete each leg.
When it launched flights to Detroit a few years back, the carrier highlighted that its route was aimed at both business and leisure travelers. It also noted that — as per its core business model — it would offer connections beyond Reykjavík to destinations across Europe.
Low Loads Partially Explain The Decision
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Icelandair’s Detroit route was not the best when it came to loads. Although reasonable, it was not as healthy as some of its top performers including Minneapolis St-Paul (MSP), Orlando (MCO) or Seattle (SEA). Data from the US Department of Transportation for 2024 shows that the Detroit route was its second-weakest route in 2024 by loads after Pittsburgh.
Loads do not speak to the route’s yields or overall profitability but instead serve as hints to its performance. Based on loads, the route was better-performing during the summer as expected, with flights consistently exceeding 80% occupancy rates. This only partially compensated the poorer performance during the winter months, though.
Icelandair 2024 Load Factors To/From US Destinations
Average Load Factor
Destination
Passengers Carried Roundtrip
87%
Minneapolis
74,000
86%
Orlando
47,000
86%
Seattle
197,000
85%
Newark
125,000
85%
Portland
54,000
85%
Chicago
142,000
85%
Denver
97,000
84%
Raleigh-Durham
77,000
83%
Washington
129,000
83%
New York-JFK
194,000
81%
Baltimore
85,000
81%
Boston
243,000
79%
Detroit
42,000
74%
Pittsburgh
22,000
Although Detroit performed better than Pittsburgh, the latter only just joined the network. Icelandair launched flights to The Steel City in May 2025 meaning it has not had as much time to fully mature. The airline also confirmed to the Pittsburgh Business Times that the service would continue operating next year as well.
Icelandair’s US Flights Are Growing Though
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Icelandair will offer more than 1,000,000 seats to the United States this year each way, an increase of 8% year-on-year. This is the first time that the carrier will surpass the six-figure mark, and is driven in large part by the addition of Nashville to the network (+22,000 seats each way) as well as frequency increases and the deployment of larger aircraft on flights to Orlando (+13,000), Denver (+12,000) and Seattle (+10,000) to name a few.
The introduction of services to Miami added a further 5,000 seats each way, and is yet another testament to Icelandair’s continued presence in the United States. While the Detroit route may not have worked out, the rest of its network is going strong—and continues to grow.
Icelandair is expected to continue adding new destinations in the US over the coming years as well. This is especially true with the arrival of its first Airbus A321LR and the eventual delivery of its Airbus A321XLRs. As the carrier’s North American Director told me in an interview last year, several destinations are being considered including in Texas and California.
