diver858

How quickly we forget; Parker (while at US) was able to wrestle control of AA from Horton by cutting a deal with labor, who have since turned on Parker. During the next economic downturn (coronavirus?), labor and investors could give Parker a taste of his own medicine, force the board to spin off the Aadvantage program, turn the keys over to Tilden, merge operations.

nearlysober

AS did a pretty good job getting their hooks into Amazon employees with promotions like this (now expired) offer to hit MVP (first status tier) after just 2 round trip flights.

stephem

Tuned in late on this, but am in Seattle and in the industry I think the BLR flight is catering to and at one of the companies people mention, the one that allows business class travel ;-) I can say this, our NW rep when I was flying monthly between Singapore and Seattle as well as quarterly between Seattle and Hyderbad told me that NW intended to do both SEA-SIN and SEA-india when they got the 787s. If the math worked then, it's likely to work even better now. Other than the business colleagues I met onboard through NRT or AMS, I meet so many Indian expats who fly back and forth, many in business class. There is a market, the YVR flights are pretty packed too (although arguably less in the front of the plane). I would say SEA-BLR has a good chance if AA finds a feeder to HYD/BOM/DEL. The LHR flight is a no brainer and given the lift that BA has added over the years to the PacNW (including PDX), I wouldn't automatically think this will reduce BA frequency. This is great, I've been flying JL/BA over the last decade when I would love to see AA metal here. Also, depending on how the China situation plays out, AA might have the ability to strike at Delta.

bchandler02

This is a really good point. Having done the ORD-DEL flight a few times when it was active (and then connecting to HYD), the long flight wears on you.
Option 1 at the time was OKC/ORD/DEL/HYD.
Option 2 at the time was OKC/xxx/LHR/HYD

I had switched to option 2 to break up the trip, as well as avoid what at the time was a not pleasant connection in DEL prior to the new airport terminals. In Y, ORD/DEL was unbearable. In J, it was tolerable but not great, however this was with the old angle flat seats. The new J seats on 789's would be much better.

Now, my choice would be OKC/SEA/BLR (and sometimes to HYD, although I'd probably spend more time in BLR these days) - but it may still be worth it to do OKC/xxx/LHR/BLR just to break up the trip into shorter segments.
It will be interesting to see if the majority prefers a extremely long flight with less connections.

bchandler02

I'd bet that more major companies mandate Y for non-exec employees than we think.

ashill

Although even that will depend on the timing. AS’s OKC-SEA flight may or may not connect efficiently to the BLR flight. Without a banked hub, I find that connections through SEA between infrequent flights (in my case, YLW or EAT to east coast, most often) typically don’t even work well on AS alone. Between partners without anti trust immunity (and who thus cannot legally coordinate schedules), cities like OKC are likely to be iffy. I ran into this when I lived in SYD and was often traveling on VA/DL to SEA when DL and AS were tight before DL started even LAX-SEA service. Without immunity, even on a route with frequent service, the connection timing was often pretty bad. This will be a challenge for AA’s reliance on AS for feed.

ryan182

In short, yes that is correct mostly, there is one exception:

yensoy

You make excellent points. The big winner, IMHO, is the PE class rather than J or Y. I think that will be the first to get sold out - any number of VFR will be willing and able to pay a little more for the additional space and comfort on this long flight.

SEA737

lol

iadisgreat

Good luck to AA. This new partnership is pretty much useless to us on the East coast.

My company has people going to Bangalore and other Indian cities (daily) in business from cities around the country. I doubt this flight will last.


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CalAlumnus13

Forgive my ignorance as to how this works... Does this mean that we’ll soon be able to earn AA EQMs and EQDs in Alaska metal, either when booking as AA- or AS-marketed flights?

I’m based in Austin, so earning AA status on nonstop Alaska routes like AUS-SFO, AUS-SAN and AUS-SEA would be great. I’m not currently able to see these as codeshares with AA flight numbers.

ashill

Yes, that is a sure thing. Once AS joins oneworld (sometime in 2021), you will be able to credit any AS marketed flight (operated by any oneworld carrier including AS or AA) to AAdvantage or any other oneworld frequent flyer program.

It is, in my opinion, highly probable that AA and AS will restore mutual earning before AS joins oneworld. AS has said that earning AS miles on AA flights will resume in spring 2020; I’m not sure if AA has said officially that AAdvantage earning for AS flights will resume around then, but I expect it to.

We don’t know what the earning rates will look like.

ryan182

Yes but given that partner flights, unless booked as AA flight numbers, will earn EQDs as a % of distance it probably won't be a good way to earn EQDs if the %s are similar to other partners.

eponymous_coward

More likely to be the other way around these days, AA's stock price is much further in the toilet than AS's is, when you add in that you'd have to give AS shareholders a premium the same way AS had to throw cash at VX's stockholders in that bidding war with JBLU (which ALK is still paying down debt from), given that AAL isn't as nice a business value as ALK, it just doesn't make much sense.



That's right, guys, ALK's market cap is not to far from 40% of AAL's. 77Ws and 789s and all.

Always Flyin

You will be able to travel to BLR in one stop to BLR through SEA from the East Coast.

There are no non-stops from the East Coast to BLR.

How is this useless to the East Coast?