3Cforme

That may be a sentiment on the DL forum but the forum is full of all kinds of crazy and the counter-factual. DL knows average front cabin fares xxx-SEA-Asia vs. xxx-JFK/DTW/.../-Asia, and the margins that go with them. Is the schedule showing additions of direct (NRT overflight) service from DTW or MSP? (It is not.)

jrl767

(1) you conveniently left the second sentence of my post (the part about "the (presumably) impending NRT drawdown ...) out of your quote

(2) while I agree that the tone on the DL board is rather more argumentative and opinionated, many of the regulars do offer some insightful comments and observations ... I'm certainly not defending anyone over there, just bringing an observation of some of their chatter to this forum, but imo there's absolutely no need for you to poke every DL poster in the eye with generalizations like "full of ... crazy and counter-factual"

LarkSFO

Delta helping to drive roaring Sea-Tac traffic

http://www.seattletimes.com/business...a-tac-traffic/

"In June, ahead of the late summer peak, Sea-Tac for the first time surpassed 4 million passengers in a single month."

"“We are expecting over the next few years that airlines will have to load some of their aircraft away from their gates. That means we’ll have to bus people to remote stands.”"

"Mike Medeiros, the Delta vice president assigned to develop the Seattle hub, said the airline is well ahead of schedule in its five-year plan to expand from 33 departures a day in 2013 up to 152 per day by 2017.

This summer, the peak will be 129 Delta departures per day."

"Delta is now connecting 700 people a day from its domestic flights at Sea-Tac onto its international flights.

“As we’ve grown the trans-Pacific gateway, it’s become very important for us to create our own domestic flow into Seattle,” Medeiros said."



"But Delta’s share has now risen to 21 percent, mostly at the expense of United, American, JetBlue, Virgin and Frontier, all of whom have cut capacity at Sea-Tac."

"Delta now operates flights on 25 of the 78 routes currently flown by Alaska Airlines out of Sea-Tac, up from just 5 in 2012.

Furthermore, Delta has aggressively stepped up competition on Alaska’s most important routes so that it now competes head-to-head on all but three of Alaska’s top 25 routes out of Sea-Tac."

"Delta President Ed Bastian said last week the carrier’s growth here “will start to meter down a bit, but we still are projecting future growth at Sea-Tac.”"

kop84

The West Coast/Mountain West flying can be done with a lot fewer planes and still offer pretty good frequency as opposed to the number of aircraft needed to field a competitive schedule for ORD/DFW/IAH.

I don't think DL is interested in adding a 1x daily flight to those cities as they would not get the type of passengers they are looking for. There are too many seats available for those routes at the moment for the investment DL would have to make. And they'd be fighting established Hubs from competition at BOTH ends with much longer stage lengths than the flights DL is offering to PHX/SFO/DEN

SEA to:
ORD - 1721
IAH - 1874
DFW - 1660

PHX - 1107
SFO- 679
DEN - 1024

eponymous_coward

AS is 1xSEA-IAH, 3xSEA-ORD/DFW. Realistically they could go 1x/2x/2x and be competitive with AS. They could start mainline with MD90s or 717 or go E175, instead of dumping a lot in the market.

As opposed to flying SEA-BOS and SEA-MCO on a 1x?

Look, if you really want to be a hub carrier you really should fly the top 10 domestic destinations from your hub, especially if you're going to drop AS from your partnership at some point (which I imagine will happen in the not too long future). ORD and DFW are important business destinations for SEA-based business passengers. Connecting them through SLC/MSP isn't going to look as good, even though they are OK as connecting hubs.

That's the point: instead of fighting over marginal markets with AS, fight over markets with larger passengers. UA is soft and has been cutting back SEA operations for years, and AA is still in merger mode for a bit longer.

PHX/SFO/DEN are all hubs (in effect, for two airlines, given WN's operations at PHX/DEN). It hasn't seemed to stop them. The stage length for a midcon isn't THAT much worse than going over 1k miles like DEN/PHX.

I still say ORD and DFW are the next logical places for DL mainline to add...

SamuelS

On the flip side, AS selling tickets from say YYC to FLL in F for $2407 USD roundtrip for a random mid-week travel date during the off peak season indicates no particular desire from AS to be competitive in selling the up front cabin, when you compare to AA ($957), UA ($962), or DL ($1026), particularly given that there isn't even an F cabin on the connecting flight when flying AS.

Even as MVPG, I have struggled to find U space on any of the longer haul flights for the more expensive Econo fares, so if I want to travel in the premium cabin, AS just hasn't been a viable option compared to the options from virtually any other carrier.

ashill

AS is 4x SEA-ORD at least on random Wednesdays in August. And for connecting flights beyond SEA (ie feeding the SEA hub), all of the AA ORD-SEA flights come into play, so AS would have a big advantage in frequencies over DL if DL went with 2x or 4x daily flights. Similar for DFW.

Many fewer competing flights on both routes.

Despite what I said above, I do agree that ORD and DFW are logical places for DL.

gm1955

Last year booked full-fare F seats, SEA-OGG in early January, but alas, too late (August) to get anything other than first row. Leg room and overall comfort had us longing for exit row shortly after the door closed.

FA indifference rounded out the whole experience and this year same trip on DL, even at $250/passenger more. Wife vows "never again" on AS, even though return leg in 2nd row was better. FWIW, we had all the free drinks we wanted.

gaiusbaltar

I'm one of those SEA/DFW business customers. I'm not happy with what AS is doing to the times on this route. They recently changed the early morning flight out of Dallas from 8 AM (which was bad) to 9 AM (which is really bad). Furthermore, their last practical flight out of Seattle back to Dallas is at 1 PM. I need a 5-6 PM flight out of Seattle going to Dallas. I'm not taking the redeye back to Dallas. That's insane.

American use to only offer a 3:30 PM flight out. Ironically, the latest flight out of the day to DFW out of SEA was on DL at around 4:30 PM, but that required stopping in SLC and there is zero chance I'm going to opt for a lay over and potential flight delay. Fortunately, American recently added a 5 PM flight out of Seattle, so I do have a viable evening option there, but what I need is an early morning flight out of Dallas that gets me to Seattle (ideally) before 8 AM. These days, if I want a late flight out of Seattle, my only option is American.

I'd have a hard time flying DL just because of how their team has treated me over the years, but if there were to add my key flight times it would garner a second look because at the end of the day I've got to do what's best for me and I just can't replace my time like I can money.

CZBB

Here we go again; effective 19 Dec 2015

DL4700 SEA1955 – 2250YEG CR7 D
DL4701 YEG0900 – 0955SEA CR7 D

edgewood49

DL is simply testing different markets to see where they get traction. Since I don't fly them I could care less.

AS has it's well deserved solid base and as long as they don't lose sight then we're all ok. I do think they need to do something about their BR's well dated, tired as well as what happened to SAN ?

beckoa

Wirelessly posted (beckoa's BB: Mozilla/5.0 (BlackBerry; U; BlackBerry 9810; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.11+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/7.1.0.694 Mobile Safari/534.11+)

Looks like another place to park a plane...

SamuelS

Edmonton is a city of over a million people, and there's plenty of demand for one-stop service, so it's a smart move by DL. What I don't know is how well these flight times dovetail into connecting banks in practice, and thus whether DL is continuing to rely on codeshare arrangements with QX, or whether YEG will ultimately expand out like YYC (4 DL flights to SEA a day in summer, 3 in winter, as well as 3 on QX and 2 on AC).

dayone

+1.

CZBB

Wow; spoken like someone who thinks the world ends at the 49th parallel. I'll be you'd also argue Spokane, Boise or Salt Lake would be sensible; all of which have a smaller metropolitan population(*1). Given that YEG serves are pretty much the last major airport heading north, it also services the massive oil community in Northern Alberta, so the YEG airport has an even larger feeder area than the ones I mentioned.

*1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o..._by_population