3Cforme

Sorry, but why do you think there are two decades of vacated hub facilities in 2nd-tier airports all over the country -- CVG, MEM, BNA, PIT, MCI? It's because their economics didn't work. They wouldn't work any better for AS. There are big - and still growing --
economies of scale such that big hubs keep growing and small hubs die off. Hubs with 400+ flights a day keep growing: ATL, DFW, ORD (x2), CLT... Bigger aircraft have lower CASM. More feed supports more destinations and a virtuous cycle builds (until you're stuck at DFW in a thunderstorm with 50K passengers from 300 cancelled flights, that is).

lalala

What is the thought on how this may affect AA award availability? I am well aware of the lack of Saver awards in j and F and I'm okay redeeming in Y if necessary. It was nice to save miles on saver redemptions in J and F while it lasted, but more concerned now that the relationship will deteriorate so much that they'll start releasing fewer seats to AS flyers.

The loss of DL, the dearth of award avail. on AF and KLM and the price of BA redemptions makes it hard to get excited about using miles to fly to Europe. Flying to Germany to get to LHR makes little sense to me, nor does connecting in SFO to non-existent awards Finn Air.

Thoughts from the mind hive?

kop84

AS has very little brand name recognition East of DEN really not even the Mississippi. In addition to the cost of building out a hub in a city that has failed as a hub for at least one airline in the past, they'd have to spend millions marketing themselves.

eponymous_coward

+1

The economies of scale mostly involve "this is a city large enough to have significant O/D demand".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...tistical_Areas

The smallest city on that list that isn't a hub is #13 (which just happens to have LAX not that far away).

STL: #20
PIT: #26
CVG: #28
MCI: #31
CLE: #32
BNA: #36
MEM: #42

"Build it and they will come" doesn't work for hubs.

Adelphos

I'm not sure how codeshares really work from a business perspective, but given the new relationship with Alaska and American, why would American codeshare with Alaska at all? Why would any codeshares exist after January 1?

ashill

Well, what's left of the partnership (on the earning side) is entirely codeshares, and they've both said they want to continue the partnership. But American would allow Alaska codeshares on their flights to help provide some extra feed and to gain the ability to put their code on Alaska's flights; AS gives AA a bunch of small destinations in the Pacific Northwest including BC and AK that AA doesn't serve (and isn't likely to ever serve). Putting their code on Alaska's flights lets them serve cities they don't serve that Alaska does.

I have no idea what is involved in negotiations about which flights the airlines put each other's code on.

Adelphos

Got it - I would assume Alaska ramping up its own flights from SEA to DFW, SFO to DFW, etc would not be looked kindly upon in terms of the codeshare relationship

flatdawgs

I suppose that depends on AA's intent to provide additional feed to AS cities or not (which might also endanger the agreement) - if they'd rather spend their resources elsewhere and not on additional flights to SEA/SFO/PDX etc., then they would likely still gain by AS adding flights to hubs where all (or almost all) onward traffic is connecting to AA flights, domestic and international.

CLT is an interesting one as currently AS does not serve it, and it has a good deal of feed to the SE. AS flyers like me who often go that way would be happiest to fly AS to CLT then connect to AA; if there are no longer reasonable benefits to be gained by flying AA, DL's more robust schedule to ATL from SEA/SFO will likely siphon off quite a few people headed that way. Looking at fares for an April 2018 weekend where I will almost certainly be traveling to GSP, for example, AS/DL through ATL is considerably cheaper than anything AA offers with a connecting AS flight - $1k cheaper - and who cares about the handful of miles I won't get credit for from ATL-GSP on DL when I can fly AS transcon? (It's considerably cheaper to fly single-metal AA or DL, but right now the AA is not showing codeshare on OTAs, AA site, or AS site.)

brp

One thing that talks to the difference in importance of this issue to (the small subset of) AA and AS flyers (represented here on FT) is the fact that, while this will be post 384 in this thread, there are only about 121 in the corresponding thread on AA.

Mostly consistent with what many are saying here.

Cheers.

channa

Actually it used to, and to some extent, it still does. There are many cities that have far more air service than they otherwise need or generate because of the hub flows (CLT, IAH, ATL come to mind). I recall seeing a graph at one point that showed CLT having some like 80% connections.



The issue is not that they didn't work, rather they no longer work due to different types of aircraft available today.

STL/CVG/MEM/etc. all are from an era when you needed 757 or larger to fly a transcon, so the transcon flows required a stop en route unless they were very high volume.

That changed with the A320, and the 737NG, changing the economics with transcons being able to be flown by smaller planes.

The idea of flying RDU-SEA or CHS-SEA or RDU-SFO some 20 years ago would have been laughed at given the constraints of that era.

beckoa

Has anyone noticed AS still selling DL flights?

No, you won't earn miles, but AS will get you (and your luggage) to the final destination on a single ticket still. And if the flight is under 500 miles, you're not sacrificing that much with EQM/RDM/etc.

felicidad76

maybe it's time to re evaluate relationship with delta again, or someone else.

ashill

Yes, although I think that AS is important to a much-larger group of AA customers relatively rarely, whereas AA is important to a much-smaller group of AS customers more often. The group of people for whom this is often important are more likely to talk about it ad nauseam. But I agree that the loss of small cities in the eastern 2/3 of the country hurts AS more than the loss of small cities in the Pacific Northwest and non-LAX California routes hurts AA.

It's partly that, but it's also just the advent of mega airlines. When there were six or seven major airlines that each wanted to cover much of the country, they each needed somewhat-distributed hubs. AA and TW each needed central-US hubs, so ORD, DFW, and STL could coexist. Once they merged, the writing was on the wall for STL. Ditto ORD, EWR, and CLE for UA/CO, MEM, ATL, CVG, and DTW for NW/DL, etc. If all of these mergers hadn't happened, even with modern airliners, I think that at least some of the now-shuttered hubs would still be around.

And now it's much harder for a small airline to build itself up organically, which is why I'm pretty skeptical that AS would have any interest or economic benefit in building up their own central-US hub. But I also didn't think DL could succeed in building a hub from scratch in a competitive environment in SEA, and they look to be succeeding, albeit with advantages that AS could never have if they started a hub in MKE/CMH/STL/PIT/CVG/LIT.

(I'm not arguing one way or the other about which if any of the mergers over the past 10-15 years should have been stopped; I have mixed feelings about that.)

flatdawgs

I've noticed - it's nearly $1,000 more to purchase an AS-hub-AA routing than an AS-hub-DL routing on the Alaska site (also showing basically the same on ITA) for the dates/destinations I looked at, from this month through April 2018. Would always buy the DL routing in that case! Of course it's $200 or so less than that to buy either DL or AA only which then leads to the question of how much the AS miles and status are actually worth to those of us who buy our own tickets. Sometimes it's probably worth it, sometimes maybe not. At any rate, that's a difference from always being worth it to book with partner AA (and before that, partner DL). I still hope to maximize my BIS Alaska travel...but we'll see how that plays out going forward.

beckoa

Haven't looked at the fares recently, but was shocked myself to see AS selling those DL flights. Unlike AA and DL with no interline nor ticketing agreement anymore.