Originally Posted by
WrightHI
Also worth remembering that one of the major reasons HA is in trouble is that WN’s “competition” looks a whole lot like using its greater size and financial strength to run losses longer than HA can and drive HA under. HA is running fuller planes at higher fares interisland, which ought to count as successful competition but doesn’t matter if they can’t sustain their business. US antitrust law decided predatory pricing isn’t really a thing because it’s economically irrational, but Andrew Watterson’s ego begs to differ.
Yeah. I’m no lawyer so I have no idea to what extent using one’s market power elsewhere to drive a smaller competitor out of business is illegal. But from a policy point of view, if you want to block the merger of AS and HA, you need to also prevent Southwest from undercutting HA with loss-making fares subsidized by their much, much larger mainland operation. If the law won’t protect HA from WN doing that, it should allow HA to defend itself through a merger that gives it the scale to compete with WN while riding out the Japanese Yen and other issues it’s facing.
And a reminder: the combined AS+HA will have 55M annual passengers (including Horizon/Skywest), compared to 172M for WN and 165M for the closest competitor, UA (plus regionals), and compared to the 86M JetBlue+Spirit would have been.