Originally Posted by
orbitmic
Finally, I was saying that once those connections exist, you can market them appropriately and create a market.
Well, if you are running the service anyway, then you are not going to turn away customer just because they are not your main target. But that is not the same thing as designing a service with these customers in mind. Nor does it follow that it is worth devoting resources to marketing an ultra-niche route. As you rightly point out, passengers likely to fly GRU-NYC-EUR rather than GRU-EUR direct tend to have very specific needs and I doubt that it would be worth BA or AA's while sense to devote efforts and resources at attempting to target that market. It is also, in this respect, rather significant that, in the OW JV, both flights are BA-operated. If you really wanted to target the SA-EUR via NYC market, it would make more sense for the flight to be operated by AA so as to avoid the change of terminals in JFK. The fact that this is not the case is, imo, another clue that the service is designed first and foremost with O&D customers in mind and is not designed with connecting pax in mind.
So it is a bit like the Europe to Australia route via California. It is not the bulk but there is a market for it and some airlines like UA like to target that niche market which has a minority but important role to play in the profitability of those routes.
What makes you think that it has an important role to play for the profitability of these routes? The idea that UA Europe-Australia via SFO customers, while a minority, have an "important role to play" in the the profitability of UA Europe-SFO routes and SFO-Australia routes strikes me as a very bold and rather startling assertion to make. Maybe my knowledge is extremely poor and yours much better (you certainly know OZ-bound markets better than me) but, again, this strikes me as a highly implausible claim. I also take note that, although you state that UA "likes to target that niche market", I entered, out of curiosity, LHR-SYD on united.com with some random dates in January to see what it could come up with and not one of the 24 choices available on the first page involved transit via the US. All of them were on *A partners via Asia. If they "target that market", they have a funny way of doing it.
The bottom line is that you and I will presumably agree that BA/AA would not run those services - and indeed have even increased them or late - and run them with high J too - if they were losing money. You are telling me that it makes no sense to you that the service could be of interest to O/D business passengers and that it makes no sense to you that the service could be of interest to connecting passengers
Hang on a minute. This is not quite what I said. I did not say that it makes no sense that the service might be of interest to (some) O/D business passengers not that it made any sense that it might be of interest to (some) connecting passengers. As regards the former, I think that it is plain that there is a market, both in Y and in C, for O/D day services between NYC and LON. This is a truism. What I found strange was the suggestion that the day flight was somehow specially attractive to business pax. Sure, there is a niche market for that service and clearly some business pax (as well as some Y pax) will find it serves their purposes. But that does not make the service especially popular with business pax. If it did, then BA/AA would fly 13 morning flights and 2 evening ones out of NYC every day rather than the other way around as they do now. The bulk of the market is for evening flights, in C as in Y. And, yes, there is a niche market that works for BA/AA but it is just that a niche market and it is by no means clear that it would work as well on JFK-CDG and past experience seems to confirm that it is not straightforward.
As regards connecting passengers, I am not saying that it does not make sense for the persons that use it. Obviously it does. Again, it is a truism. My point, though, is that I suspect that this is a small minority of the people on these flights and I suspect that this is just the icing on the cake as far as the airline is concerned. The bulk of the troops, i would expect, is O/D and this is the O/D crowd whom the flights are designed for.