I don't see how B6 offering Mint on routes like JFK-SAN/SEA is going to kill AA. There are only 16 seats in a Mint cabin, and the overwhelming majority of people flying AA on these routes are in coach.

When Mint is an option, I generally take it over American's terrible domestic first class. The only real place where AA is competitive is on the few routes served by the 321-T (which I do like). That said, my experience with irrops on Jetblue has been pretty decent -- during some of the winter storms last year out of JFK, both carriers were messed up and I had an irrops situation with both. Each handled it well, and both got me where I was going the following day in the class of service I'd paid for without drama.

There's a lot of profit in those seats, though. I can see it flipping a formerly marginal flight to unprofitable. I think the SEA story also is one of much firmer competition in the last 5 years from DL, and the end of having AS as a codeshare partner to provide feed.

FFP is actually why I still fly AA mostly these days. Being able to redeem miles (occassionally with AA) but mostly with OneWorld airlines. Actually, also I do find AA to be the cheapest on transcon flights now for J. Which is quite surprising. Great for me though. I really like the lounge.

This may shock people, but there are a lot of people out there with plenty of disposable income that don't care about miles at all.

But here is the thing, people also fly to SAN/SEA/LAS. There is simply no way I'd fly AA if mint is around the same price point and offering lie flat.

That's where the money is made. You think they are making money selling O/W tickets for under $200? Both AA and DL's fares on JFK-SAN have crashed since Mint entered. That's why DL panicked and rebranded their one flight on 757S as D1, even though not much really changed. JFK-SEA will be one to watch. My guess is AA will be gone from this route in a year or 2.

I don't know why people keep talking about IRROPS support. I've flown B6 a lot and have never had any issues other than being late sometimes, which just happens a lot out of New York airports. But I also fly leisurely mostly.

How would it be tenable for AA not to fly from a hub (JFK) to one of the most important business destinations in the country (SEA)? This gets back to my post starting the thread. If you are giving up on routes like JFK to SEA, then it is really a long slow march to dehubbing NYC.

In terms of B6, are they really making money on their Mint flights? Mint really seemed to have knocked Virgin/Alaska out of this market more than the majors (I remember seven or eight years ago when Virgin was the cool way to fly transcon).

Please circle back next winter after calling the EXP line and the Mosaic line, when JFK is in the middle of a snow storm, and you're trying to be rebooked... B6 just doesn't have the capacity. At the airport, good luck finding a B6 agent who can assist whereas with AA, I have to say, the GAs in the ACs in both LGA and JFK have saved my bum on multiple occasions.

If you have yet to experience IRROPS, then count your lucky stars...

Well, I think definitely you fly a lot more than I do. I get most of my miles from either international work trips or leisure flights. I rarely do domestic work trips. When I did fly a lot on B6, it's generally been on routes with multiple daily flights. For my flying needs, it has never been an issue. But flying in y with legacy airlines tend to be torture since my flights are normally over 2 hours. I'm willing to live with IRROP issues once every 20 flights if the other 19 are more comfortable experiences.

That's just my guess. I have no clue on AA's plans in New York. Just from what I've seen, JFK is just not regarded as important to them as LAX or ORD among the hubs that face a lot of competition. So with fuel price going up and competitive pressure in the market, I think SEA is at risk based on the yield numbers I've seen.

AA's recent actions indicate they no longer consider JFK a true hub, at least not in the way they view LAX or PHL as hubs. I agree on JFK-SEA, as well as JFK-SAN/LAS/DEN/EDI/MXP, on being the next routes headed for the chop block.

Even as late as 2017 IME, AA was still giving me routing options through JFK and sometimes DCA for the routes mentioned. Now it's almost always PHL for connections ex-BOS, followed by CLT, and then ORD. I rarely if ever see JFK anymore which is a shame because the JFK facilities are much nicer than those in PHL. Given the choice between two delay prone airports (JFK and PHL), I'd take JFK any day...

Routing options through JFK seem to be mostly gone. For example, I was looking at a recent LAX-DCA trip and would take the LAX-JFK transcon if it was available. There were legal connections through BOS/PHL/CLT/etc. but not JFK.

AA in NYC is too big to be a spoke and too small to be a true hub, so you end up with a “focus city,” which is euphemism for “we’re trying to find a strategy that works here.” Boston is similar in some respects, but I digress.

As the smallest of the US3 in NYC, AA seems to be having trouble landing NYC based corporate clients, which are the lifeblood of all the major airlines. I’m sure the sales team hears that they are smaller than Delta all the time and lack the regional lift that Delta can provide, thus failing win the contract. The two major aces that AA has in NYC are the A321Ts and the BA alliance. Outside of those routes, I’m not sure what is safe, though I’d guess CDG (too big not to serve) and MXP (fashion corporate contracts) are safe.

I know that the ZRH route was essentially underwritten by one major corporate contract. My guess is that AA lost their exclusivity on that contract and had to decide between cutting ZRH altogether (embarrassing) or moving it to PHL and hoping they could recover...they did the latter. We don’t know how that is working out so far though.

Vasu Raja, AA’s head route planner, is a smart guy. Give him and his team enough time and some ability to experiment and they’ll hit on a winning strategy. It just may not resemble the AA in NYC you used to know and love (and AA seems to be ok with that).

Does anyone know what the daily flight count out of JFK is for AA? At the time of the merger, it was around 99 or 100 daily flights between AA and US.

"Hey, BA, we know you just spent a bunch of money on T7, and you're not even done with the remodel yet, but throw those capital expenditures away, way before you planned to amortize them because, um, some FTers want OW in one JFK terminal"?

:rolleyes: Lighten up sometimes.

https://www.ny.gov/programs/transforming-jfk-airport

No one besides BA cares if they just spent millions to remodel the terminal. BA made that decision knowing their lease is only good through 2022 with a limited three year extension option if PANYNJ agrees.

When 2022 or 2025 comes and PANYNJ wants a new terminal in that area the money BA put in now to renovate won’t matter. Where BA ultimately decides to go is up in the air if this is the path the Port Authority chooses.

Definitely - I think there was a misunderstanding on what I meant in my post. Any carrier could move in matter of months if they want to its not a 2-3 year ordeal (case in point DL at LAX), but things are very different for BA/IB given the real estate investment they have at JFK. Hence why I said BA/IB is a different story 2 posts ago. What I am implying is that they are not going anywhere soon with the new lease agreement in place, but once it expires it can go many different ways.

As you mention they definitely will want to amortize the cost which means a minimum of 5-7 years before they make a decision. The probability of PANYNJ saying we want to rebuild T7 in 2022 or 2025 when the BA lease expires is slowly increasing. For all we know maybe BA/IB will end up being the anchor tenant in the new T7 and chose to stay.

For the other OW carriers - making any move will be more simple and can be done in a matter of months if there is a desire to move.

At the end of the day T8 is a ghost town relative to the other JFK terminals and AA is not fully using the resources available at T8. There will be a point in the future where some new market entrants (or a current competitor grows), Oneworld or not, will be put into T8 unless AA manages to convince some of their chums to move over to T8 to free up space at a different terminal. I could be wrong and AA wouldn’t care if UA uses T8 if they ever re-enter the JFK market, but my hunch tells me they’d prefer to keep UA or any key competitor out of T8.

I definitely like JFK more than PHL, but unfortunately (for us), AA execs have commented on the strength of PHL and CLT due to their profitability :(

AA has had to compete much more in JFK, LAX, and ORD. As Vasu Raja and his team continue to look at the JFK routes, I think we'll be left with only the profitable ones.

it seems like based on JonNYC recent tweets, there will be more cuts coming. Be interesting to see what else they plan.

As for BA, there is quite a good chance they will be out of T7 when their lease is up.

They're been talking about its profitability at investor days and interviews for 3 years, and expanded from an 11 aircraft to 34 equipped that way. All signs suggest it's been the main driver of profitability these last few years at Jetblue:

https://www.fool.com/investing/2016/...es-growth.aspx
"This week, JetBlue provided the most detail it has ever offered to quantify the financial impact of Mint. Before Mint's introduction, JetBlue's New York-Los Angeles route was significantly less profitable than the system average -- and the New York-San Francisco route was even worse.

However, in the course of two years, the LA route's profit margin improved by 17 percentage points relative to the system average. The San Francisco route's profit margin improved by 18 percentage points. This has made them two of JetBlue's most profitable routes."

https://seekingalpha.com/article/416...nscript?page=3
"Our most mature Mint routes again saw RASM outperformance system in the first quarter."
"But I will say that Mint's been wildly above our expectation."

Seems like -- from their on-the-record public statements -- that Mint is making bank for them. I wonder if AA's domestic first product could do the same?

I've been wondering for a while as to why they recently started doing DEN from JFK? Was it just to prevent too many New Yorkers from ditching AA at once?

Probably slot-squatting, to keep JFK slots away from competitors.

So AA has to compete. They already put out a better product than DL and have caught up to UA. I don't know why these companies are scared of competition. How are they expecting to grow if they don't compete?

I know it was on a holiday, but flew JFK to DEN on July 4, got an upgrade for myself and my companion, and there were six empty F seats. I'm not sure how much longer this route will last, especially given they don't offer anything but a redeye back. At this point, my main reason for trying to keep AA status is fairly easy upgrades on certain routes I travel. Many of these upgrades are achievable with Gold status.

Well just saw we're getting Saturday only service LGA-EGE on a..................A319. Sounds like a miserable flight on that plane type (assuming this is on a LUS bird).

YMMV, but I'll take an LUS A319 over a CRJ200 any day of the week, and twice on Sunday. :p LGA is such a CRJ farm, I'm kind of surprised AA didn't think they could get away with offering that a/c for the service...

exactly, number 1 reason to be an AA status holder in nyc, for the ugprades =)

I was shocked I didn't get upgraded yesterday MIA-JFK. There were 14 seats open on the 763 when I booked around a week ago

Perhaps because it was the last day of a long 4th of July weekend. Heavy travel day..

Ha, last night's 7:30? Same experience - I booked months ago with a fully empty F cabin, and even a week ago it was barely half full. I wonder if there was a large group of unassigned seats in F? Upgrade list was 12 or so deep, and I was third on the list.

My guess is they'll sell everyone of the F seats on that flight.

I've flown the JFK To EGE flight, which benefits from international connections and is on a 757. The LGA to EGE will definitely siphon off more domestic travel. I will consider it

How do you like that Delta GM status? Not sure if I can swing the MQM this year, but I should be easily able to hit GM status on Delta next year assuming I upgrade my Delta AMEX to the Platinum or Reserve

I'm liking it! Besides C+ upgrades all the time, I am upgraded to FC more than I was expecting. I'm also thanked for my loyalty much more as a GM than as an AA EXP.

I fly several times a year between JFK and ZRH. Now that they have removed the NSs and require a connection in PHL or LHR, especially since my most recent trip JFK-LHR-ZRH and ZRH-PHL-JFK required long connections in LHR and PHL with delays on JFK-LHR, I emailed AA CR noting these issues. I also noted that other airlines, DL in particular, run NSs between JFK and ZRH, which would equate to lost revenue when I fly DL (instead of AA).
I just received a response, some of which was probably "boilerplate", but the main gist was that they lose revenue on that route--how come DL is (presumably) making a profit.:confused:
[The ZRH-PHL flt is scheduled to arrive at about 3 pm and the PHL-JFK on a "small" RJ requires a 3+ hour connection--a big annoyance, even more so if the PHL-JFK were cancelled since the next flt is the NEXT day.:td:]

AA management has been accused of not always making the best decisions, but I'm pretty sure that they knew when they left JFK-ZRH that DL and LX fly the route and that AA would lose a large fraction of their business and revenue on that route to those two when they abandoned the nonstop.

Did they say they lose revenue or they lose money? Because if they lose revenue (ie their revenue on the route is negative), that's truly impressive. However, I can certainly believe that their costs exceed their revenue. It's not difficult to imagine DL and/or LX making a profit when AA doesn't on a particular route. For example, DL can offer a good many more connections at the JFK end, in part because they don't have a hub 120 miles away that can probably serve every connection that would be possible over JFK just as efficiently (from AA's point of view; I recognize that a small number of passengers [most of whom are probably on FlyerTalk] might prefer JFK over PHL as a connecting airport, but I would bet the number of passengers who will choose a flight based on that difference is pretty small. In fact, I'd bet there's a larger number of people who will avoid JFK and its chronic delays than who will avoid PHL and it's slightly-less-chronic delays).

DL also could easily have a different mix of corporate contracts, frequent flyers, operational costs, etc at both the NYC and ZRH end. (It really could be different in a way that favors this route rather than larger overall.)

And DL could be losing just as much money as AA but be more willing to stick it out for whatever reason. The revenue picture is likely to improve for DL and LX with AA gone, just as it would have improved for AA and LX if DL had left.

There are just all sorts of ways that DL and LX could be doing better on this particular route than AA even without AA management doing a poor job. At the end of the day, AA just isn't as strong in NYC as DL. This all, of course, has been hashed out at great length in this thread.

Their main emphasis was on the word "profitable".
On a side note, their email was TIMESTAMPED on Sunday, 7/22/18 at 10:20 PM (EDT)...AA CR must work interesting hours.:)