Originally Posted by
jsloan
Certainly. However, UA has years of highly-relevant data on any given route, whereas the rest of us have anecdotal data at best.
Is it possible that UA is making a mistake? Of course; there's always the network effect. They will likely have some percentage of flyers defect because LAX-DFW was a flight that they really needed. Their hope is obviously that whatever new service they add will bring more profitable replacement customers.
My point is just that none of us know the situation as well as UA, and to say things like there is "[n]o reason they should have discontinued them" is to make an awful lot of assumptions.
UA can parse the data any way they want to make it seem like it’s the right decision. Not unlike the shrink to profitability focus during the Smisek era based on the highly relevant data available. I believe we argued the same thing in FT, they must have known what they were doing and the collective wisdom available here wasn’t worth the digital ink it was written on.