Originally Posted by
ashill
Indeed. But these before-8:00 flights from SEA to the east coast make connections for the NW (YLW being the important one for me personally) difficult or impossible too, and that seems like a set of connecting markets that AS should care about. A 7:45 flight probably only blows up YLW and YYJ (because of the need to clear Customs and thus a long minimum connect time), but still annoying and puzzling that they don't make connections possible. And the earlier flights (eg the 6:59 AM to BOS) make connections from the crack of dawn flights out of EAT, GEG etc impossible, which seems silly.
This is more of a problem relating to their limited flight options to the East. If there is only 1 or a couple flights a day, they need to optimize the flights for O/D to be competitive. If they can sell seats in the summer with the vast majority of them going to O/D passengers at a reasonably profitable fare, this should logically be the priority (at least for a bean counter looking at the short term). At the moment, they seem to really only care about making connections from the likes of YLM/YYJ to cities West of the rockies a priority. Whether or not that is a good strategy is definitely up for debate but reduction of code share options with AA/DL does definitely hurt in this regard as the AS network suddenly becomes much smaller for a large part of North America based travellers. One small tweak in times takes out a whole days worth of reasonable connections to many destinations.