obnoxoid

Inclined to agree. While I don't like that they're cutting SFO-MSP, an example of this growth is at BWI--started a while back with just one service to SEA, and now has service to SEA/SAN/LAX, SFO through VX, and seasonally, PDX.

notquiteaff

When I lived in the Bay Area, maybe five or so years ago I had to fly to MSP on business (my one and only visit to the great state of Minnesota so far). I was a UA 1K, and as I recall they had exactly one non-stop each day. I think it was an A319. I just checked and today they (or rather, Skywest) were flying two E175s to MSP. If the big dog in San Francisco can't offer more non-stop service, it doesn't seem surprising that AS has trouble with that route (and that they didn't put more flights on it to begin with).

sfozrhfco

...yet UA is actually able to sustain 3 mainline flights in the summer season when AS can sustain none.

Colin

AS has nixed VX LAX-CUN as well

ashill

Slight correction: that's mainline market share. Skywest is 9%, and my guess is that's mostly United (although some is AS and some is probably AA and DL; I don't care to dig into that level of detail), so United is probably closer to 50%. But the more important point stands that VX and mainline AS are each smaller than 4th-place DL's mainline share (with Skywest in 3rd place) at SFO. So it's not like VX had a particularly big operation at SFO to begin with; they just served a decent number of cities with less frequency and more glitz than AA and DL, which each have essentially hub-only service with a lot of capacity from SFO.

AS+VX are flying as many or more ASMs as they were before the merger, aren't they? Yes, they've reallocated some of the frequency away from SFO-big cities. But they've added 44 new markets across the network in about a year. That is not trivial. It's not like VX was printing money in SFO even with their supposed high value customer base, so I don't really get the rampant talk about how badly AS has mismanaged the supposedly-great VX assets. But to those who still ask the what-did-AS-get-for-their-$2.6 billion question, as always, AS is better off dealing with reallocating the VX capacity than they would be contending with B6+VX.

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I wonder if there's a deal to be made for AS with the pilots' union to find a way to make an all-Y 82-seat E175 configuration affordable (ie replace the three rows of F with four of Y, with a slight reduction in seat pitch in the back -- could still be perfectly comfortable) for intra-CA service.

milypan

eponymous_coward

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Fr...p_destinations

AS and VX serve all top ten domestic destinations. That's not a nonstarter. A nonstarter might be something like this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollyw...p_destinations

But yes, minus DL and AA, reach east of the West Coast is down for sure.

notquiteaff

Sure. But you knew that when you, as an SFO based flyer, selected AS as your airline. Or if it was originally VX, you knew about their even more limited route network. None of this is new, and no one here hopefully expected them to turn their presence at SFO overnight into a UA clone.

If i was still living in the Bay Area, i would probably still spend most of my dollars with UA.

ashill

Something that technically even United doesn't do (since they don't serve JFK, whereas VX serves both JFK and EWR).

But be careful with those statistics; they represent the first destination of passengers, not O&D traffic, so hubs get artificially inflated. That said, though the numbers are inflated, I expect that for SFO, the top ten destinations for O&D+connecting traffic are pretty similar to the top ten for O&D traffic only. DEN is the most obvious candidate for the numbers to drop significantly when you count only O&D traffic, I would guess. For BUR, I expect that the numbers for hubs (including WN "hubs") are very heavily inflated because there are only so many flights.

milypan

That's actually not true (that they serve the top 10 domestic destinations). They don't serve PHX, which is top 10 from the Bay Area. The reasons PHX is not on that list are:

1. The list splits one large market into two (JFK and EWR) since it's by airport, not MSA
2. It doesn't include OAK and SJC traffic (so it misses all the WN traffic to PHX)
3. Per ashill, it's not O&D

But yes, I concede that if you're a business traveler that only travels west of the Rockies and doesn't care about frequency, then AS can be a viable option. I'm doubtful that describes the majority, or even a significant minority, of CA business travelers. Certainly I could not recommend AS to any of my colleagues with a straight face.
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To be clear, I never expected them to turn into UA at SFO. It's simply not possible – UA has almost triple the domestic gates of AS+VX combined, plus they have the hubs east of the Rockies that enable service to small cities (which AS used to enable via DL/AA). But I thought that perhaps between SFO + SJC + OAK they might at least provide once daily service to, say, the top 10-15 O&D markets from the Bay Area. It's increasingly clear that won't happen. The problem isn't that their network isn't as good as UA's out of the SFO...it's that I'm not even sure it's as good as DL's. It's just really hard to see who their customer base is going to be from California, and I think that's come across pretty strong in the last couple conference calls too.

WebTraveler

Delta is entirely different. They were the country's largest airline at the time. They have an incredible nationwide and worldwide network and a capital structure to support it. Alaska does not. And, if you recall, Delta established its routes and used Alaska as a feeder and it's frequent flyer program for awhile before then deciding to push Alaska aside. BIG differences here.

ashill

You may be right, but the readily available statistics for OAK, SJC, and PHX all exclude O&D too. I expect WN has significant connecting traffic at all three of those airports (and AA at PHX), so whatever numbers you have that would put PHX 11th on that list (10th if you combine NYC) inflate Bay Area-Phoenix too. But it's not like the number of fingers we happen to have on our hands is some magical cutoff, of course.

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OK, but did you recommend VX? Because essentially all these issues were there for VX too (except VX was hip and charged loss-making fares, so Bay Area people wanted to fly them).

I think the real difference between AS and VX is that AS has reasonable other places to put the VX planes (the 44 new markets, which certainly have come at the cost of some existing markets), whereas VX just didn't.

ashill

Yup. And Northwest/Delta built the TPAC focus city then hub before they started going head-to-head domestically with AS. And SEA-touching flights even now can't be more than 10 or 20% of DL's operations; whereas SFO and SEA each account for a far larger share of AS+VX's operations: there's a heck of a lot less risk in building something up when it's a few percent of your operation than when it's 25%.

fly18725

Seattle is less than 10% of Delta ops, though ATL really distorts the picture.

milypan