Originally Posted by
EWR764
Must be the case. SFO-AKL drew a lot of seats all of a sudden to a previously-unserved market, not to mention the additional NZ-USA capacity brought online by AA LAX-AKL (a larger local market than SFO) with AKL-IAH no doubt poaching some East Coast connectivity.
If it's not a JV decision (which I doubt) then it's possibly another example of the new sheriffs in Chicago flexing some strategic muscle...
The SFO-AKL route has been around since 30 June 2004, NZ started it 3x weekly with an 744. Then grew the route up to 12x weekly at peak, this south summer they didn't need the extra services with the daily UA service, so NZ just operated an daily service. During the Southern Summer UA has only really added 2x weekly capacity on the route. Most of that time UA has codeshared on the AKL-SFO service.
So it wasn't really an unserved route, there was definitely already an established market for UA to tap into.
Maybe it would work it NZ went 12x weekly April to October, and 14x weekly November to March.