PRG-PHL route: how doing? Will it go year-round?
 

Does anyone know how the new Prague-Philadelphia route is doing? I suppose it relies mostly on tourist traffic but am curious if it could go year-round or will at least remain seasonal going forward.

IMHO, it has no chance year-round. Even Delta - with Czech Airlines in SkyTeam - operates JFK-PRG seasonally.

Would be great to have some data/insights before writing it off!

I do have some data and insight. Delta at JFK moved 1 1/4x times the number of international passengers as all carriers combined at PHL last year. If Delta can't make year-round work at JFK with a SkyTeam partner, AA at PHL has no chance.

Carriers don't publish RASM by route. Full planes at cheap fares don't mean much.

Anecdotal reports are the flight is heavily supported by leisure traffic, which is highly seasonal.

Yah, at this point you take your chances going anywhere on the 763 (and the 752, 'specially in the winter). I know they say they'll be eliminating them in 2019 and replacing them in 2020 with the 788s, but I'm suspicious given the extended fate of the 333s.

Does that hold for a place like Prague that has virtually year-round tourist traffic?

Might 787s make this route 'more' viable year-round?

Prague's tourist traffic is not flat month-to-month by any means; see page 51 of https://www.praguecitytourism.cz/fil...rze_en_web.pdf

While they don't show a second cut on the data (split by month and country of origin), I would imagine that the seasonality of US-based tourist visits would be even more pronounced, due to the distance involved and typical U.S. vacation periods. For example, the data shows a big spike in December, but probably not that many Americans are going over for Christmas markets (whereas Germans, still the largest tourist group in 2017, are probably doing this a lot).

The 333 retirement was more for fleet commonality and strategy than them falling apart, IIRC. The a333 fleet has the same average age as AA's 772s.

To be fair, the 763s are barely older than either above yet are a operational nightmare. Why is AA unable to keep the 763s in good dispatch reliability while others such as DL can?

The previous page also indicates over 1.1 million overnights by US tourists. Even with fluctuation between months, that still translates to several thousand Americans visiting Prague on any given day. Sure, many are on multi-city visits and not all would fly AA etc., but it strikes me as not plausible that an all-year-round route to a major US airport or two is not sustainable. The challenge, I agree, is likely related to yields on the new route as well as on DL's JFK-PRG, which of course I do not know.

I am not trying to blindly advocate for something that cannot work but am just wondering why no airline seems to be willing to put a bet on one of the top-5 most visited European destinations year-round. This ignores, moreover, the increasing business traffic which is now mostly routed via FRA, MUC, AMS and LHR.

There probably just isn't much in it for them; easier to let the alliance partners do the heavy lifting and concentrate on higher-revenue flights. In AA's case, it seems that there's generally a widebody shortage, and the destinations that can be served falls off pretty quickly. Maybe there's a business case, but it can't just be a business case in isolation; it has to be strong enough to warrant taking an aircraft off of another route.

If PHL-LIS was never a year-round route for the past decade, then PHL-PRG ain't gonna be one either. Even PHL-VCE was never year-round. BTW, I have been to Prague several times in the middle of winter, and there is a noticeable difference between those tourist crowds and the ones in the summer.

Yields between Europe and USA tanks in the colder months - PRG is not a huge business destination like the markets you mentioned which still sees steady business demand when the tourist season dries up. Naturally those cities are also massive hubs for the largest EU airlines which present hundreds of connecting opportunities that PRG does not even remotely offer.

In other words, in the summer months AA believes they can command fares that leisure travelers are willing to pay to make the flight profitable, but they clearly do not believe they can charge the same price point while sustaining the number of customers willing to pay that amount in the colder months as they do in the summer.

I can't see anything more than starting the season several weeks earlier - as long as popular-ish in Winter destinations like FCO and BCN are seasonal, PRG has no chance of going year-round.