Originally Posted by
Consultette
After talking to an AA employee about the merger today, they said people are happy and the flight attendants are happy to be getting some more time off (apparently they are reducing the number of FAs on AA flights). Asked a flight attendant about that and they confirmed some people have a lot of time off next month and they went into how great it is that AA leadership is fired.
I didn't have the heart to tell them that the fact they're going to have a lot of people sitting around probably means they are going to have a large amount of "restructuring" (layoffs) in the near future. They made their bed, I guess they can lie in it.
I did have one of the best FAs ever on my flight though. Never taken this flight before or had him - so I'm not sure whether it can be attributed to him being a great employee or happy about the state of things and just giving great service.
I said to a pilot on Wednesday evening, "meet the new boss, same as the old boss...."
Nonetheless, there may be some near to medium term benefits to elite level FFs. Based on integration issues at during the UA/CO and DL/NW mergers, there will be a need to go into apology mode when similar issues in this merger occur. Much has been said about luring over UA and DL elites, but retention is going to be equally if not more important. It's not easy to replace a ticked off $30k spend per year customer. Therefore, I see plenty of nice promotions near term by AA to keep us happy when things go wrong. Sure, there may be (actually more than likely) some long term changes to make it more difficult requalify at the highest levels with some reduced benefits. However, I see AA rolling out DEQMs (general and targeted) to compensate for the likely integration pain. I'm not going to complain about that.
The merger certainly fills the east coast gap, strengthens the Caribbean with an already strong South America, is sort of okay in Europe. The AA/AS helps with the gap in the NW US. Leaving Asia. While it can take a long time, why not try to grow it organically. You have the cornerstones (let's include SFO, but go iffy with MIA due to distance, and replace it with say SEA) of AA plus the three hubs of US. OPs who fly to Asia more regularly know far better than me, but why not select a city on the continent to create an AA hub that could appeal to Asian carriers for codeshare from there? You guys can pick the cities, I've never been. Remember, AA exits BK with its $5bn in cash, US has about $1bn, less $1.3 (let's say $1.5bn) in integration costs (cash). A portion of that kind of liquidity can be used to fund it not counting modest leverage.
I think its then time to address the terminals. LGA presents opportunities, but is a mess. The've pretty much taken over the C councourse for AE but that will be spun off most likely. US has the west side of a terminal that was a terrific improvement to LGA in the 80s as DL has taken over the east side. LGA has planned a central terminal rehab ($1.3bn) that quite frankly AA should lead. I've commented before that T8 should be expanded to cover the footprint of the old T9 and become the "oneworld terminal" by bringing over IB, BA, CP, US from T7 and JAL from T1. DFW is great. MIA I can't comment on because I've only been there once over the last four years - you have to believe they need to expand to steer more traffic to the Carib region from there to compliment CLT/DCA/PHL. SFO, I think we all eagerly await taking possession of VX gates - whether that happens, who knows. LAX needs a much stronger offering to be the gateway of the west/pacific. Swap terminals with UA to be closer to the AE sat "terminal" joke?