Originally Posted by
Kmxu
There is no question that UA is making more money for not increasing the China flights because it can keep the fares to TPE/HKG/ICN/TOK artificially high. These fares will go down with increasing flights to China. More convenient schedules to China and increasing flights will make someone like me to stick with UA.
United has said repeatedly that they would like to increase the number of China flights. I'd imagine United knows what their profit maximizing seat availability to China is, and it's higher than the currently allowed levels. Remember, you want to increase production as long as marginal revenue is greater than marginal cost. Even considering that additional seats would lead to a drop in overall fares, the market is so far to the left on the demand curve right now for US-China flights that seat availability can increase quite a bit before overall profit starts going down.
Part of it is that I suspect that United is losing a lot of traffic--especially business traffic--to 1-stop connections offered by JL KE and others, that it probably would be able to keep if it can offer SFO-PVG double-daily, for example.