Name: Why Does Seattle Have So Many Flights to Taipei?
Uploaded: 2026-02-08T13:13:25.000Z
Duration: 11 min 21 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Adverbs of degree

Seattle has nearly 30 non stop flights a week to Taipei.

That's more than New York, Chicago and Houston combined.

What makes that strange is that Seattle doesn't have one of the largest Taiwanese populations in the country.

Los Angeles and the Bay Area do by a wide margin.

So why does Seattle quietly operate one of the most heavily served Trans Pacific routes in the United States?

It's the short answer is because Seattle isn't flying to Taipei.

For Seattle, it's flying there because of how Taipei functions as a hub and how airlines build their networks around it and why Seattle fits into that system better than almost any other US City.

A lot of Trans Pacific flying is built around destinations.

To a degree, those are places that people are actually trying to get to.

It's not the final stop, but it's the midpoint.

Taipei is one of those airports that quietly punches above its weight as a connector.

From there, airlines can reach Southeast Asia and a long list of secondary cities that don't have nonstop service from the US Places that would never justify a direct flight on their own suddenly become very reachable with one stop.

That changes how airlines think about demand.

And once a route starts feeding connections instead of just local passengers, frequency starts to matter more than size.

One massive flight a day isn't nearly as useful as multiple departures spread throughout the day.

More flights mean shorter connection times, more options, and fewer missed onward flights.

This is where Taipei really separates itself from other Asian hubs.

It's efficient, it's geographically well positioned, and it's built for smooth transfers.

Airlines don't need to rely on a single daily departure to make the economics work, because they can add frequency and let the network do the heavy lifting.

That also helps explain why multiple airlines are willing to compete on the same route.

They're not all chasing the same exact passenger.

Some are focused on Southeast Asia, some are feeding alliance networks, and

others are prioritizing cargo or time sensitive traffic.

Taipei gives them room to do all of that without stepping on each other too much.

When you see a route like Seattle to Taipei operating at this scale, it's less about how many people want to go to Taiwan specifically, and

more about how many places that flight unlocks beyond it.

It's not the biggest city on the west coast, it's not as internationally dominant as Los Angeles or San Francisco, and

it doesn't have the sheer volume of other west coast hubs.

But once you look at how airlines actually use Seattle, it starts to make a lot more sense Geographically, Seattle is in a relatively comfortable spot for Trans Pacific flying.

Flights to Asia are efficient without being extreme, and

airlines don't have to deal with the same level of congestion and slot pressure you see farther south.

That makes scheduling easier, especially when you're trying to run multiple departures a week instead of just one big daily flight.

Seattle also operates like a gateway without feeling like one.

It has a strong domestic connectivity, plenty of long haul infrastructure and room to grow, but

it doesn't come with the operational headaches that airlines run into at LAX or San Francisco.

So for carriers, that combination is pretty hard to ignore.

Cargo plays a bigger role here than most people realize too.

The Pacific Northwest moves a lot of high value freight, and

long haul routes like this benefit from having strong cargo demand underneath the passenger operation even when the passenger demand fluctuates.

Cargo helps smooth out economics and makes higher frequencies easier to justify.

In addition to EVAAir and China Airlines operating cargo flights specifically and just as important is who Seattle doesn't have to compete with.

Nearby Portland doesn't have the scale, and Vancouver comes with international borders and different traffic rights.

So Seattle ends up being the cleanest, simplest option for airlines looking to serve this part of the continent.

Put all that together and Seattle stops looking like a strange outlier and it starts looking like a really practical choice for airlines that want reliable access to Asia without the complications that come with the bigger hubs.

Now, I'm not going to sit here and tell you that Seattle isn't a large airport.

In fact, it ranks as the 12th busiest airport in the United States by total passenger appointments, which is heavily fueled by the fierce domestic competition competition by Alaska and Delta.

If this so called battle for Seattle intrigues you, I found a great video by the creator Aviate that I highly recommend.

I'll link the video in the description below.

Once you really zoom out and look at who is flying this route, the picture changes pretty quickly.

This isn't one airline taking a risk or throwing capacity at a market just to see what happens.

It's a mix of very different airlines with very different business models all finding a reason to be here at the same time.

Alright, so let's start with EVA Air because they're the foundation of this route.

EVA has decades of experience flying between the US and Taiwan and their approach to Seattle feels anything but experimental.

The combination of daily service plus additional weekly frequencies tells you that this is a market they understand well enough to fine tune.

They're responding to demand they know already exists, both for passengers and for cargo.

EVA Air operates dedicated cargo flights from Seattle.

And Seattle fits cleanly into eva's broader North American network.

And their consistency is a big reason this route feels stable rather than speculative.

Then there's China Airlines, which takes a more selective approach, but ends up reinforcing the same conclusion.

China Airlines isn't trying to overwhelm the route with frequency.

Their schedule is tighter and more deliberate.

But the important part is that they're willing to commit widebody aircraft humans at all.

Seattle doesn't have to be China Airlines biggest US Market for the route to make sense.

And their continued presence suggests that it is.

Where things really get interesting is when you start looking at how US Airlines fit into this picture.

Though Delta doesn't operate long haul routes like Seattle to Taipei on a whim, when Delta commits to daily service, it's usually because the route plugs into something much larger.

Seattle has actually quietly become one of Delta's most important long haul gateways, especially for Asia.

And Taipei fits neatly into that strategy.

What makes Delta's presence even more compelling is that they're not relying on the flight to stand on its own.

They have a partnership with China Airlines, and

Taipei effectively becomes a connecting point into a much larger part of Asia than Delta could ever serve directly.

Passengers can fly Delta into Seattle, cross the Pacific to Taipei, and

then continue onward on China Airlines to destinations across Southeast Asia and beyond.

So from the passenger's perspective, it feels like Delta suddenly has a much deeper Asia network than what's visible on their own route map.

That kind of partnership changes how the route performs.

Delta doesn't need every seat filled by someone flying Seattle to Taipei.

Some passengers are connecting onward, others are coming back the other way.

So the route works because it feeds into multiple systems at once, and

So we know that China Airlines has a partnership with Delta Airlines.

But what if I told you that wasn't the only US Airline that China Airlines has a partnership with?

Now it's less obvious, but arguably just as important.

Southwest Airlines also has interline partnerships, not just only with China Airlines, but also EVA Air.

It's not a codeshare and it's not an alliance level relationship, but

it does allow passengers to book a single itinerary from a Southwest city through Seattle onward to Taipei on both carriers.

That matters because Southwest touches a huge number of secondary and mid sized cities across the United States that don't have nonstop international service of any kind.

So suddenly Seattle becomes a gateway not just for the Pacific Northwest, but

Passengers who might never consider piecing together separate tickets can now reach Taipei and beyond with a relatively straightforward connection.