Which in itself kind of fortifies my assumption that they really only had white men in suits looking at the Asian strategy without actually having someone who knows Asian business culture in their strategy team

Did AA expect Open Skies to occur under a country that was run for almost fifty years of protective businesses sheltered by the conservative LDP which helped bring Japan into an economical powerhouse from the ashes of WWII? Or see that NRT would actually become an efficient hub when it has been facing NIMBY opposition from neighboring terrorist farmers ever since its opening? Pretty sloppy research for "Asian strategy" IMHO.

One of the major hinderances of continued reliance on travel agents in Asia is...because their language is not based on the Roman alphabets. IT reservation systems cannot handle Japanese/Korean/Chinese characters they all have to be alphabetized. A Japanese person's name like 山田太郎 can be Anglicized as Taro Yamada, Taroh Yamada, or Tarou Yamada and can vary from whatever your passport says. But then, no one in Japan ever uses their Anglicized form so no one really knows what's the correct form. Flight information that we all know of like NRT, HND, ICN, GMP, BUS, PEK, TPE, HKG are pretty much gibberish to them when everyone knows it by 成田、羽田、仁川、金甫、釜山、北京、台北、香港。Even US and European destinations are problematic as it adds a whole new field for destinations. We have it easy, just type in "London." Over there, you have to also add fields for ロンドン(Japanese)、倫敦(Chinese)、런던(Korean). Now do that for every single destination out there; that's immediately 3 times as much work to maintain the database. Address forms are also different, ever see there's no consistency to addresses in Asian business cards? Because there's no proper format to convert it into English! A postal code in Japan is XXX-XXXX. Most online websites use the XXXXX-XXXX format of the US. Or phone numbers where there's a lack of country codes, area code and an eight digit phone number whereas US reservations sites only have the generic (XXX) XXX-XXXX format.

That said, a person needs to actually understand English to book their own tickets. A family of four owning a tea shop in Kanagawa practically has no use for English in their daily lives; do you expect them to study English just to book a ticket? No, they'll just hire an experienced travel agent or tour agency to book their tickets to LA.