Tan Flyr wrote:*UA ORD-FAT JUN 0>0.8 JUL 0>1.0
WOW...we finally get a FAT-ORD flight..after nearly 30 years..surprised this was UA..I thought AA would have jumped in first. Either way, a welcome addition to Fresno's nonstop destinations.
Nice. Glad to see it. FAT is the gateway to a lot of incredible, scenic natural beauty nearby and I agree that ORD-FAT was a market seemingly begging for a nonstop flight, at least in peak summer. And, alas, at least to start, an EJet seems like the right aircraft to develop the route - mainline-like product but only half the seats to fill. If this route does well, which I expect it will, I fully expect to see AA enter the market and/or, probably more likely, United upgauge to mainline.
CIDFlyer wrote:Skywest/UA out of DEN seems to be taking a page from AA/DFW with going for smaller EAS cities in the plains to their large hub. AA has had a lot of success with this with DFW as their hub and in a good position to connect to anywhere, hopefully UA will too, although DFW/AA is a much larger hub at DFW with connections virtually everywhere. Hopefully it works for UA, DEN is a natural connecting point for these cities. I've noticed they have also been trying this at midwestern cities to ORD (Quincy IL, Cape Girardeau MO for example).
My thoughts exactly. AA has had significant success turning DFW into a progressively larger and larger gateway to the small markets throughout the Midwest and Great Plains, and parlaying that success to/from DFW into broader network development, including steadily plugging more and more of those markets also into ORD. AA appears to have very smartly leverage the network offering that the combination of DFW and ORD can provide for these smaller central U.S. markets - for connections north and south, and east and west.
Having said all that, it seems like the other logical carrier to do precisely the same thing is, indeed, United. Just looking at a route map, it isn't at all difficult to see how a combination of DEN/ORD for United could function very similarly to, and competitively with, AA's DFW/ORD. DEN obviously offers slightly less vs DFW by way of connections south and east, but also obviously offers a breadth of connectivity west that DFW cannot really match. This is, of course, nothing new - United has been leveraging the combined weight of these two excellent hubs book-ending the Great Plains to drive a strong presence in the region for decades. It's great to see United continuing to apply this in progressively smaller markets.
With United's stated goal of growing DEN by dozens of daily departures in coming years, I agree that markets like these will almost certainly be some of the means by which that happens. These smaller markets - many of them EAS or SCASD to start - often provide yields at a premium to the broader network, and channel captive or near-captive connecting flows into network hubs.
jumpship wrote:FCA is booming in the summer from the appearance. I haven’t checked stats but I know Glacier hit 3.3 million visitors. I even saw WestJet q400s there this summer. There were a lot of mainline of mainline flights.
I'm hoping AA will do DFW-FCA at some point. AA seems to have met with some success thus far with its tentative steps - at least tentative vs traditional regional heavyweights United and Delta - (back) into Montana. FCA is, indeed, a booming tourist destination and seems like exactly the type of mountain market that seems to historically excel at DFW, at least seasonally. It isn't hard at all to imagine AA make a daily A319 work DFW-FCA during May-September.
tphuang wrote:VX operates very high CASM aircraft on these routes and B6 with the better and cheaper product has taken up all the premium market. Remember, they also offer very weak schedule vs B6 out of BOS and AA out of MIA, so don't get nearly the same number of close in bookings or corporate contracts.
I think this pretty much hits at the crux of Virgin America's (really Alaska's) challenge in these highly-competitive transcon markets - in most cases, Virgin America is now flying one of the (relatively) highest-unit-cost aircraft while attracting some of the lowest yields because of a combination of relatively less competitive premium hard product, and just a broader weakness in terms of corporate contracts, network synergies, etc. AA's A321T product on JFK-LAX/SFO, for instance, obviously has extremely high unit costs (CASM) given that it's an airplane designed to carry >180 passengers but configured to only carry 102. But on the flip side, AA's A321T product obviously commands significant yield premiums to several competitors given the premium cabins and resulting low density. It's a similar story with many of Virgin's competitors.
But I think the "fix" is obvious, and pretty much already telegraphed - those planes are going to be getting a lot more dense, and a lot lower-cost. It appears to me that Alaska has concluded - probably correctly - that at this point it is unlikely to ever be competitive, on a product basis, up against its four large transcon competitors (AA, Delta, JetBlue and United) and, frankly, this isn't and wouldn't be in Alaska's "sweet spot" operationally or commercially, anyway. I think the smarter approach for Alaska - the one the company appears to be planning - is to simply adjust its aircraft to reflect the reality of the airline's competitive position in the market, rather than spending lots of money trying to adjust the competitive position to the aircraft. Flying a more "standard" domestic 2-class aircraft on these transcons with a less impressive hard product will obviously foreclose Alaska's competitiveness for the most discerning and product-sensitive of transcon flyers - at least those that aren't extremely strong Alaska corporate customers or "captive" FFs - but it will also dramatically reduce costs and may well end up being quite profit-maximizing given fares on these routes.
