Originally Posted by
mecabq
How will UA compete? Many posters here are talking as if this is the first route on which United has gone up against another airline that is superior in every way. As with those cases, (1) Mileage Plus benefits and (2) price, especially for those not O/D in IAD and DXB.
I agree that anyone who purchases premium-class tickets with someone else's money would be hard-pressed to stay on United, but that has always been the case (again unless someone was flying only IAD-DXB and valued the non-stop). For me the only benefit to UA on this route is the SWU/GPU use from Y->C, which never seems to be available anyway.
By the same token, as others have noted, EK is probably competing with other airlines even more heavily than with United heavily on the route -- most of EK's passengers are presumably originating in IAD and terminating in India, Asia, Africa, Middle East, etc., so real competition is LH, QR, and TK, which also started IAD recently and is going for similar passengers as LH and EK.
You are correct that the majority of EKs passengers are going or coming from India, Pakistan, Africa, etc but they are already at war with the European carriers over this and the war is all but lost already. LH/BA/AF have 2 flights a day each from there Hubs to Dubai VS EKs 10 flights a day to Germany, 12 to LHR/LGW and 3 to CDG (many of these w 380s). The European carriers can't compete w service, price AND point of transfer. People HATE transferring in airports like LHR/CDG and Dubai is a great alternative. UA can't sustain there IAD-DXB flight with just passengers originating at IAD. They feed passengers in from the whole country but as EK opens more U.S. Gateways, it will slowly eat away at UAs business. That said, even with EK coming to IAD, UA should do just fine. They only need to fill one 772 a day and have enough corp customers, fly American AND M.P. junkies to do that.
looked at another way, EK has 12 flights a day to Pakistan but there are still enough passengers left to fill that P.I.A. Death trap 743 every day