What is the difference between a hub-and-spoke and a point-to-point airline?
They are two opposing network strategies, and the choice shapes almost everything about how an airline operates and what your journey looks like.
Hub-and-spoke concentrates flights through one or a few major airports. Passengers from many origins fly into the hub, transfer, and continue to many destinations. Most legacy and flag carriers use this — British Airways at Heathrow, Lufthansa at Frankfurt and Munich, Emirates at Dubai.
The advantage is combinatorial. With a hub, a relatively small number of routes creates an enormous number of possible journeys, because every inbound connects to every outbound. It makes thin routes viable: a city that could never fill a daily aircraft to twenty destinations can support one flight to a hub. It concentrates maintenance, crew and ground operations in one place, and enables banks of flights timed so arrivals and departures cluster for short connections.
The costs: longer total journey times, an extra takeoff and landing, connection risk, and vulnerability — disruption at a hub cascades across the network.
Point-to-point flies directly between city pairs with no expectation of connections. Most low-cost carriers use it — Ryanair and easyJet are the archetypes, and Southwest built the model in the US.
The advantages: simpler operations, faster aircraft turnarounds (a major cost driver), no baggage transfer infrastructure, no waiting for connecting passengers, and use of cheaper secondary airports. Delays do not propagate the same way.
The costs: each route must sustain itself, so only reasonably dense city pairs work, and passengers wanting anything else must self-connect.
Self-connecting matters practically. On a point-to-point carrier, two flights are two separate contracts with no protection between them — miss the second because the first was late and it is your loss.
Long-haul low-cost has struggled partly because the model depends on feed that point-to-point does not provide.