Originally Posted by
AJNEDC
I am beginning to wonder about the benefits of these alliances and their necessity. They all seem to be evolving at they each try to squeeze as much revenue while providing as little as possible.
Yet DL has been and continues to be one of the most profitable airlines.
I don't have hard data on this, but AA has outsourced most of it's intl routes to OneWorld partners. There are a handful of routes to Europe that AA flies its own metal, but BA is their partner for any European destination. AA may fly a frequency here or there, but BA metal is doing the bulk of the frequencies. Same for Asia, with JAL and Cathay doing the heavy lifting. The only time you really see AA metal is out of their MIA hub to Latin/South America and that's not heavy premium demand in the same way as Europe and Asia. This doesn't seem the case for DL and UA, who fly their own metal to more destinations, and control their route map. AA prefers to fly to partner hubs and feed the network, it remains to be seen if their newer non-partner hub routes will be successful.
AA is primarily a domestic airline and that's not the place to be in 2026. The demand is premium intl and transcon, and that's areas where AA is weak and also means they have little control over award availability. DL and UA are headliners of their alliances, AA is a cog in the OneWorld machine.