Originally Posted by
cairns
They blamed subsidies. The fact is they weren't competitive in either hard or soft product and once Emirates et. al. started service people choose the better airline
I'd venture to say that this has been over exaggerated, and the "mass exodus" of travelers from UA to EK on the basis of EK having a superior soft/hard product should be taken with a grain of salt. For one thing EK was 10-abreast in Y vs UA's 9-abreast and most importantly, at least from the govt travel side, they wouldn't have switched travel over to EK because they were required to fly the contract carrier which was UA. It wasn't a high-yielding route for UA but having the contract in place definitely played some part in UA running it and notwithstanding the politics of the ME3, it was a pretty ridiculous action by GSA to award the route to JetBlue in the first place as they didn't even operate the route directly. The irony with that is the US govt essentially would be subsidizing EK as well.