Any "stats" in that report are questionable.

You seem to see things in either black and white. If carrying connecting passengers was all bad, then no-one would do it. But presumably you understand that that is a non-starter.

"Percentage of pax that transfer" is not a recognized stat for comparing airlines. But indeed, some airlines rely more on connecting pax (think KL at AMS, for example) than others. But no two airlines will ever be identical, on any measure. Pick any measure or stat, and someone has to have the "highest" and someone else the "lowest" value among all airlines. Things like total revenue, total passengers carried, total costs, etc, are more relevant for the bottom line - not "percentage of pax that transfer".

Your "analysis" above also assumes that there is a non-stop option available on every single one of Emirates' offered route pairs - and this simply is not true! Just as is your hypothesis that EK must be financially insolvent.

Some pax are connecting through DXB, but end up staying a few days in Dubai. How do you count them in the stats.

Sure - I admit it is difficult, if not impossible to find out the proportion of the pax are stopping over, whether the pax in the DoT report are originating in the US or abroad etc. etc. - essentially the difficulty is in finding out which proportion of the passengers on these flights are paying decent fares (as in, not clearly loss making as the discount Y fares are).

The overall point though I think still stands, which is that there is demand for travel to DXB (either as part of a stopover or O&D) - that it isn't a backwater where no one wants to travel to, or connect through. We know that the fares offered are not all discount Y el-cheapo loss leaders, and we know that some fares are extremely expensive (and are bought by people on this forum!), so from that we can construct a model of the pax yields based on a plausible distribution of fares across the cabin which gives EK sufficient revenue to make the routes viable on their own (although probably not a big contributor to profit what with likely razor thin margins).

The question is whether, ideologically, a corporation and its owners are morally wrong if they are happy not to deploy capital in the most financially efficient way (aka, have the best returns on capital) - because I think EK could find better uses for deploying capital than A380s to the USA, certainly.

An interesting article caught my eye on anna.aero today:

I guess that, at 55% connecting in FRA, that Lufthansa's business model is also dangerously insolvent?

(Lol - actually, LH are in a bit of a mess!).

I had thought that AMS's figure would be higher than just 40.5%. However, given that KLM will be responsible for most of the connections at AMS, I'm sure that, looking at KLM's traffic share that is connecting, it probably runs at over 50%.

The article also lists the top 15 connecting destinations at each airport - and they are predominantly shorthaul - for FRA, they are ALL shorthaul/domestic, the most distant being BCN!

This article from late 2012 gives a rate of 70% for connecting pax at DXB:

Also in that anna.aero article:


http://www.anna.aero/wp-content/uplo...iddle-east.png
Connecting traffic middle east
Source: ADP (January 2015).

You remind me of a really bad Fighting Irish team from the mid 1990's. They were down hopelessly against a Kentucky team coached by Pitino, which played a nasty full court press for 40 minutes, but the Irish kept on flighting despite being down by 40,50 points or so. I really admire your input and willingness to fight the obvious reality.

Like I said before, both FRA and AMS worked due to the right mix of passengers, fares, fees, regulation etc.

KLM realized years before deregulation finally kicked in that is not going to last, hence Pieter Bouw came up with Alcazar, a brilliant plan. Unfortunately, the citizen of the world, Bouw, underestimated the nationalistic streams in both Austria and Switzerland, lead by a young Jörg Haider in Austria...

Despite Alcazar not becoming the fortress it used to be, KLM functioned somehow, mostly due its position at the crossroads of world trade. 74M, regulation at Schiphol resulting in very high fares ex AMS also played a certain part. Kudos to the Dutch Government for aligning everything that was necessary to keep a small country and its airline in the air.

The data compiled by anna is way too superficial. To give you an example, a passengers on a stopover counts four times, as much as a connecting pax who never left the terminal building. But he also counts as an O/D pax, probably the reason why DXB is close to other hubs with way more real O/D pax. ;)

BTW, only because 55% connect at FRA does not mean that this number is applicable for LH as well.

Good point, but all those European connecting numbers look healthy to me. I've never studied it, but I would think that a major global airline is going to get about 50% connections on int'l routes. The USA airlines operate mega hubs for a reason. Sure, the weak hubs with low O/D traffic have died (the Pittsburghs, Clevelands, Detroits and Cincinnati's of the world) but the cities that attract high-yielding O/D traffic tend to work fantastically as hubs. The mix has value --hubs have value.

The problem becomes when your hub city has low O/D traffic. Dubai probably qualifies as a low O/D city, but those problems are magnified when it comes to transatlantic travel. There is very little USA-UAE traffic: I'm sure a couple flights a day from the USA to the UAE is more than adequate to meet this transport need. Indeed, "zero" flights would be adequate: this modest transport need could more efficiently be met by tapping into the extensive USA to Europe to Middle East network. These nonstop flights can therefore only exist for connecting traffic. And that's a mix that is impossible to make money on -- more so when you fly ultra long haul aircraft with low density.

Thank you, but perhaps FD stands for "Fighting Dutchman" rather than Flying Dutchman. :D

Worked? As in no longer works?

Well, it's true that the Europeans have been watching "their" transfer traffic being creamed off by more exotic rivals - despite the fact that the number of pax transferring in Europe continues to grow (though far more slowly than the overall market). I guess the Europeans will continue to lose longhaul-to-longhaul transfers and be left with a much greater proportion of shorthaul/domestic transfers. The top 15 shorthaul/domestic transfers at FRA already account for almost 20% of all connecting passengers. Ouch!!!

In many ways, FRA should never really have been Lufthansa's hub - in a country of many large cities but no real overwhelming centre of gravity (at least, not within the main landmass of the old FRG), I guess it sort of ended up in Frankfurt by accident. Not to trivialise Frankfurt's industries or charms, but it doesn't particularly stand out at as an obvious destination for having such a large hub airport - so we can consider it like Dubai then, or at least in the way that the OP views Dubai.



So in effect you are saying that Aeroports de Paris (ADP) - who provided the figures for connecting pax that are used in that anna.aero article - are counting connecting pax differently in Dubai (and AUH and DOH?) as compared to the European airports (CDG, FRA, LHR, AMS) in their graph?

Why would they do that? Why would they compare incomparable numbers in this manner? To cry wolf in the manner of their American aviation counterparts?

Indeed. Given that LH will be responsible for the majority of transferring traffic at FRA, the percentage of LH's passengers that connect will be much higher than the airport's overall 55% rate, possibly rivalling EK's 70% figure. (I know more people who go to Dubai on holiday than who go to Frankfurt. Same for business, actually!!!)

@OP:

In this thread http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/trave...travel.html(as as well as the thread you started a year ago on the same topic, you seem to be concerned about rising airfares on intra-US routes.

In short, you want
1) AA/DL/UA to offer you cheap flights within the US
2) EK to refrain from undercutting AA/DL/UA on US-India++ routes

How do you reconcile these (contradictory) positions?

Wrong wrong wrong. For the nth time, EK are NOT flying to fulfil the need of passengers going from the US to DXB. It's the OTHER way around.

You're still fixated on the idea that DXB is a remote and isolated destination. In 2014 around 15 million passengers used DXB, or 20 per cent of the total number of passengers, on non-EK/FZ flights not as transit passengers but as actual departing arriving passengers. This figure excludes EK/FZ passengers using DXB, which in itself if it was just 5 percent of the total passengers carried (it's more than that) then we'd be looking at another ~2.5 millions. This is a significant figure for any airport, and certainly for a city with 2 something millions.

In essence you imply that EK should stop flying to the US and the traffic can be can be fulfilled by DL/UA. Now that's an extreme interpretation of your standpoint, but would seem logical if you had no credentials whatsoever.

The logic you continuously present is flawed and lacks evidence.

Forgot to add, it's interesting how some folks here (including the OP) view the ME3 airlines as a single cluster as if they were partners or are in an alliance or benefiting the same group of entities that stand behind them. They're not, not even in defending their position.

It's also interesting and ironic how, within the US3 movement, AA are attacking their own partners, QR and EY. I mean AA benefit one way or another from both airlines, and hence if they're accusing them of being unfair, then how could they accept revenue from unfair sources?

Looking at the Dubai chart seems those A380s are really doing the job for Emirates, no wonder Tim loves them!

and Bangladesh, and Pakistan, and Thailand...
(NYC-TYO-BKK, a permissible route on AA/JL is only 300 miles shorter than via DXB, and going via DXB is only about 100 miles longer than via PEK on CA, which has also had cheap fares for this market.)

I don't "want" anything. I've just made observations that, thanks to consolidation, the USA airlines now operate like an oligopoly on domestic routes. I don't think the USA airlines appreciate this observation, but that doesn't diminish the accuracy of it.

It also says nothing about whether heavily subsidized Middle Eastern airlines should be allowed unlimited access to USA airports. Just because the highly-profitable USA airlines could arguably "afford" to compete against these gov't airlines doesn't mean it's the right policy for the USA. Indeed, I think it's a terrible policy, because it violates free trade policy and hurts American business and labor.

There was an interesting verbal exchange yesterday between Emirates and the Big 3 US airlines over Emirates 2 for 1 USA sale, as documented by the excellent Dallas News airline blog. Aviation reporters were interested in this because, well, it's highly unusual to see such a deeply-discounted airfare sale, much less one good for 9 months. And in the context of the current subsidy battle, it seemed interesting and provocative.

The US airline spokesman offered a perfectly logical, pitch-perfect PR statement: “Fueled by tens of billions of dollars in government subsidies, the Gulf airlines do not operate as independent commercially viable entities. This promotion is a prime example of how these carriers tilt the playing field.”

Emirates responded as follows: “Fare promotions are a very common airline marketing tactic which US carriers frequently employ, too. To say one of our seasonal offers is actually evidence of subsidy is not only totally irrelevant and unfounded, but also smacks of desperation on the part of the Delta-AA-United coalition to ‘prove’ their spurious allegations.”

I know there are a ton of Emirates apologists here, but that was a simply awful PR response. This isn't a garden-variety "fare promotion": it is a highly unusual 2 for 1 ticket offer with few restrictions. Under the circumstances, some explanation of why this would actually make financial sense for the airline (introductory routes, perhaps?) instead of downplaying its significance would have been wise. And then claiming the US airline comments are "desperation"? Wow -- that is totally out of left field, flat out silly and makes Emirates look like they employ the most vicious PR hacks in the world. It reminds me of the worst types of political spin I've ever seen. It's the kind of thing you say when you've been caught with your hand in the cookie jar and you're trying to bluster your way through a crisis. I can assure you that the smart US aviation reporters like Dallas News' Terry Maxon aren't buying that line for a second.

http://aviationblog.dallasnews.com/2...gateways.html/