knit-in

You are speaking to deaf ears.

Xlr

Since related party transactions have come up again, note that on page 104 of EK's most recent financials, there is a note stating that related party transactions (except dnata) were conducted on arm's length terms:

avcritic

There exists a market, but does it belong to ME carriers. USA has Open Skies with India for almost nine years yet neither American nor Indian carriers able to make money on these routes. Both sides have couple of routes each.

US carriers historically love hands-off approach.
1) Delegated domestic regional routes to Regional Carriers without caring for quality of product or service.

If ME3 continued to code share with US3 and live with bad regional service, US3 wouldn't have started this petition. Keep in mind prior to JetBlue and Virgin American, ME3 used to connect traffic with AA/DL/UA regional partners. Probably ME3 were fed up with Envoy.

2)Delegated Indian traffic to their EU JV partners. This worked very well for decades, limited service but solid money. EU carriers got greedy and started consolidating Indian routes rather than expanding. While in bed with EU carriers, they completely avoided partnerships with Indian carriers. Big mistake.

US3 lost their shirt on India by just depending on EU JV partners.
JetBlue and Virgin eating away their feeder market share.
Now they see 5th freedom as a major risk to TATL market.

You want to go where?

In a free market situation, a market doesn't 'belong' to anyone. Certain competitors may have an inherent competitive advantage for this market, however. It seems reasonable to me that the competitive advantage would go to airlines which have a hub in between North America and India as this would allow the most efficient set-up of one-stop flights. Sure, you might be able to set up a non-stop operation where the traffic between origination and destination justify it in a very few cases, but since it is the aggregate of many different routes on either side which really make it a viable market, the hub in the middle structure makes sense. This suggests hubs in Europe or the Middle East. Because of either anti-competitive rules or economic factors which would restrict an American or an Indian from setting up a hub in these two parts of the world, It seems likely that the major carriers competing in this market are going to be European or Middle Eastern.

I have flown from the US to the subcontinent more than 20 times in the past few years, normally on European carriers. The flights to India are packed, with many op-ups due to overbooking. Is it at all surprising that the ME3 see an opportunity here? Not to any sane person. This doesn't mean that their specific approach is the right one, but to deny the existence of this market is simply sticking your head in the sand.

i do agree with you that the primary motivation of the US3 is the threat to a portion of the TATL market, which is ultimately India or Africa bound. However, a threat to your market share is not the same as a financial scam.

UA1K_no_more

And blind eyes, considering how many times the OP has "mistakenly" provided links to articles that state the opposite of what the OP claims.

NOIR

Dutch restrictions unlikely to hurt Emirates, Etihad

http://gulfnews.com/business/aviatio...ihad-1.1519570

AA_EXP09

It certainly does count, but there is data that suggests there is far less interest in women's football.
As an example, take my many expatriate friends in SIN.
Many of them were willing to wake up at 0300-0400 local time in order to watch the matches (and a few even paid for the SGD 112.35 subscription to do so, and another few used VPN services to watch the matches streamed on BBC/ITV/RTS/Univision, the former 3 with commentaries I can understand to some degree of proficiency.)
Very few plan to watch the women's matches at such a time.

iahphx

As it typical here, you pile lots of words in to something that sounds good, but is largely logic free.

Yes, people travel between the USA and Indian Subcontinent (ISC). But it isn't a particularly lucrative market -- as indisputably shown by the almost complete lack of nonstop flights between the two countries.

As far as connecting service goes to the ISC, the Mideast is fine, but I think almost everyone in commercial aviation would say that Europe has an advantage (absent subsidies). Because there is demand for European travel from any medium sized American city, it is easy to put a few ISC-bound pax on each of these flights, and aggregate them in Europe, where large populations add substantially more demand. This is in contrast to little demand for US-Dubai/Qatar travel, and then a small population base to add additional pax to the mix. Add in the fact that the US and European airlines are linked in their marketing alliances and that many passengers will feel more comfortable transiting through Europe v. the Middle East, and you most certainly haven't built a better mousetrap.

Despite this reality, the ME3 seem to think the "sky is the limit" with regard to US-Dubai/Qatar service. We're now up to an astonishing 25 flights (less than a decade ago, there was one!), and all the CEOs say they want more. Are you guys going to seriously claim there's that much demand for more ISC travel? Again, if it's such a great market, why are there no nonstop flights? It just doesn't add up. At least in the real world.

irishguy28

But Emirates doesn't operate non-stop from the US to India - which gives them the advantage. They scoop up lots of passengers in the US, and they scoop up lots of passengers in India - but, in both cases, they are not restricted to carrying only just the O/D [US/India and v.v.] passengers, as is the case for a US or Indian carrier. Emirates can offer something like 142 destinations to its passengers - a d all over the world - in contrast with a much much smaller range of destinations offered by the direct, non-stop providers.

So the US-to-India flow exists on Emirates beside the US-to-Asia, US-to-Africa, US-to-Middle East and India-to-Europe, India-to-Middle East, India-to-Africa, India-to-South America flows.

irishguy28

iahphx - Make sure you read that post above.

iahphx

We now have a battle of the experts! Etihad has found their own economists to show how much their flights have stimulated demand, allegedly contrary to what the US airlines economists found.

http://www.eturbopr.com/PDF/OpenSkyReport1.pdf

Of course, both sides are "right" in their reports -- because they're measuring different things. Etihad is measuring total traffic to India and, of course, that's up -- just like total traffic is up over that time period to every developing nation in the world. The US airlines are doing a regression analysis comparing the growth in Indian markets to other developing markets, and say there's no difference.

Personally, I say "whatever," because I don't think "stimulation" is a particularly important metric. My gut feeling is that the ME3's subsidized flights SHOULD stimulate demand -- when you price below cost, more people should buy -- but that obviously wouldn't justify the service.

There's also some stuff about pricing in the report, which might be interesting, but in my quick read of it tonight I couldn't discern anything meaningful from the numbers presented. Almost all long haul flying requires premium pax travel to exist, and I would be shocked if the front cabin margins on USA-Mideast flights could compete with those of USA-Europe. So the ME3 already start will an insurmountable deficit. And then, of course, Europe-India premium traffic is going to be stronger than Mideast-India traffic. So the ME3's flying palaces don't make a heck of a lot of sense, which is the real problem when you start crunching the numbers.

irishguy28

It has been explained to you today why it therefore makes sense to serve US-to-India as a one-stop service. Your point is redundant.

And most European carriers do just that, many in co-operation with their US partners.

So clearly it's a model that works - and therefore one that the ME3 are wise to copy. Especially when they serve more Indian cities than any European airline, and particularly when they can also route Indian pax throughout Europe, Middle East, etc.


This is getting stupid now. It would be remarkable if there were 25 flights to the US to UAE/Qatar and these were the only flights operated by the airlines in question; it would be strange if all flights terminated in UAE/Qatar with no possibility of any further onward connections being made there.

If the airline business was a novel, it's as if you're still struggling with understanding the first paragraph of the Foreword....

You really just don't seem to "get" things. You are still coming out with the same lines from your very first post.

GUWonder

Speaking to self with a mirror on the wall? That's one way to characterize those words or your own, but it also is characteristic of the kind of propaganda coming from the US3.

The ME3 provide more Indian cities with international arriving/departing flights than Air India and Jet Airways combined. Can't blame the ME3 for that. The line in India is that EK has been the national/international carrier of India.

irishguy28

And you're saying that with a straight face, rather than tongue-in-cheek?

FD1971

Do you think he is responsible for the recent developments regarding the traffic rights of EK in the Netherlands...

I mean it is his job after all, isn't it?

And one of your other sources, Vespermann, delivered a pretty poor presentation about EK's growth some years at a conference, well, you guessed right, at Schiphol. It is actually quite funny, because he worked for a private Business School in Germany struggling to break even for years, so quite frankly using him as a source is blooby brilliant. Thank you for that

No analysis, just basic reproduction.

Most of your staff you posted look like basic reproduction, I cannot really read comments about subsidies not being received and that EK is clean. De Wit points out what we already know...and what I point out since months...

BTW, I really think we have passed the point about subsidies, even the apologists are trying to defend the subsidies now by demanding the same standards for everyone, so it seems to be quite obvious that they understood where all the money was coming from.

Anyway, Thanks a lot for trying. Jaap is true expert, has seen it all, understands the markets, works a lot across the border to the East, so he is by far the best source anyone came up with over the last 2100 posts.

Vespermann is not really someone worth mentioning, maybe you even find his presentation hold at Schiphol from some years ago...