Originally Posted by
east_west
For most travelers, especially business travelers paying 5-10K for J fares, the last thing they want to do after a 15hr flight is get in a car for another 2.5-3hrs.
True, but travelers (business or leisure) have been doing that in SAN for more than decades, especially for those who are around the Oceanside to La Jolla (not to say the inland Temecula) area. Passengers in SAN only have 1 option across the pacific via JAL to Tokyo. All others require a transfer, whether it's LAX, SEA, SFO or YVR. Personally I don't find transfers via any US destinations to be a pleasant experience as you have to go through immigration and then re-do all those check ins when you are back in the states (and going through LAX is definitely not fun).
5-10K J fares? I guess your target airlines are the likes of CX or UA. I am sure passengers can live with BR and CI's 3.5-5K fares in J and stick to that. Going to Riverside is almost 2 hours as well and people have been doing that in the Great Los Angeles area. Driving and traffic is normal to So Cals.
Originally Posted by
east_west
For O&D, LA may have a huge Asian/Taiwanese population with lots of VFR, but J cabins are filled by business travelers, and Taiwan business is tech hardware, not LA's finance/legal/film/aerospace. Many of Taiwan's business customers are NA companies primarily in SFO/SAN/AUS/SEA/NYC/BOS/WAS/DFW. LA is probably in the top 10, but there isn't much more than parts of AVGO and some low-volume aerospace. But most of these companies have existing contracts...
Of all, LAX is a very interesting market for the Taiwanese. Most premium market you named are actually not in LAX. For LAX it's more of a leisure premium and small business travelers (nothing big to large corp level). The Taiwanese there are so rich they fly back to Taiwan every month or every other month or so to visit (semi-retired). Besides the Taiwanese, airlines also rely on transfer markets beyond TPE and LAX to get their feeds, and their cheap J fares find many passengers even in Business Class.
CI was stupid dumping all their Premium passengers ex-TPE to other areas in the US to BR when they cancelled the afternoon flight. Not sure if restoring the afternoon flight next week will get passengers back.
Originally Posted by
east_west
For onward transfers, it seems JX thinks they can also serve SE-Asia with A321s so presumably they'd eventually build their transfer network on the TPE side to fill the Y cabin. I think there is an opportunity to do a better job than CI/BR of building NA feed by partnering with non-alliance players B6/AS. For example, they might find a way to serve the 5M ppl in Detroit metro that can't book a flight with BR.
Hopefully they can build up with 321. As passengers we are always welcoming competitions to get low fares.