Originally Posted by
Kacee
While I usually agree with you, I beg to differ here. I'm not sure you're familiar with the route, the demand, or the fares. Fares are painfully high and the premium cabins typically sell out, on airlines (NH and JL) that don't give premium seats away. There's a fair bit of business traffic between the two countries and lots of tourist traffic both ways, which is particularly high end in the BKK-TYO direction (HiSo Thais love visiting Japan).
HND or NRT, though?
Anyway, I think we’re actually saying the same thing: neither one of us thinks that UA is likely to add an NRT-BKK flight.
If they were to add that flight, then they would be competing directly against their JV partner for intra-Asian travelers, and they’d have to share revenue with them on connecting travelers from the US. UA has to know that a GUM 737 isn’t going to be an attractive-enough option for intra-Asia travelers to be worth the angst, and a 787 is more useful to them operating out of SFO. That’s why I deduce that
if they were to add that flight, it’s likely that it would be a replacement for an NH flight — because that makes more sense than head-to-head competition does.
But it’s an exercise in conditional probability.
I do
not think UA NRT-BKK makes much sense. If UA were to add a new NRT destination, I’d expect it to be to a destination that NH does not serve.