Originally Posted by
Kacee
If you do that in Asia, the number of places that will qualify is extremely limited and all are already served (Singapore, Hong Kong, Taipei, Seoul, Japan).
China has a lower average GDP ($6900/person in 2016) but that masks major regional differences, just like we have in the US (.e.g. the per capita income in SF is $49,890; its is $18,100 in Alabama). Just looking at disposable income (
https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-ec...tandards-china ) PEK/PVG have about 50,000y/per person in disposable income (that is roughly $7900/per capita); while the basically the rest of the Country has less than 20,000y/per capita. E.g. Xian, where UA's service pancaked, is in Shaanxi province, which has a per capital disposable income of around 17,000y ($2600/per capita). My guess is that the variation is even greater than these numbers given the propensity of the Chinese to fake economic numbers.
My point is that there are regions and cities in counties that are not as wealthy, that have larger middle/upper middle classes and substantial numbers of very wealthy people. KUL may get there, BKK was on the way there, but the country has stalled out due to bad governance/social unrest, DEL/BOM and probably now BLR are already there. MNL & SGN are nowhere close.
I have my strong doubts about how the US carriers will be able to compete long term with sub-standard hard and soft product and bad reputations for service against Asian carriers that often times have lower wage rates, but it seems that ULR flights w/o enough J demand (and with BKK an incumbent carrier with a better reputation for service) is not the way to do it.
Originally Posted by
laxmillenial
Was / Is GDP a considering factor when deciding to serve non Shanghai / Beijing China locations last year / two years ago?
i would wager no... but I could be wrong.
I - in large part because the very different level of income - called both the Xian and Hangzough flights as flights that would not last. See e.g.
https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/25478610-post78.html I took a fair amount of grief for this view (and I'm sure I deserve all the grief I get.
) with the counter argument being that well, UA knows what it is doing. My rearview mirror take is that UA's old Jeff-centric management had no clue what it was doing.
I am inclined to think that Kirby - which I sharply disagree with his views re service/product quality, and think he is stuck in the ULCC mindset of charging for water - does understand and can require real modeling of competitive posture and how it impacts demand. I doubt, particularly with higher fuel prices, that we see any more SFO, let along LAX to Asia ULR flights.