To be honest DFW-TPE only really hurts EVA themselves most, as they interline heavily with Alaska on that route to SEA.

Delta's very weak to DFW and only has one flight that connect to SEA-TPE that has an uncompetitive 7am departure + 6am layover. Delta flies two daily A220-100s between DFW and SEA, which is a testament to their weakness on that route.

I imagine EVA has assessed the market and expects sufficient interline and local yields out of DFW to make it work. 3x weekly isn't even that much anyways.

I think there is enough demand considering that the most amount of Taiwanese in Canada live in Ontario. The concern is that JX doesn't have a proper partner on this route, it would have to be Porter, which makes some more sense as Alaska also partners w/ Porter. In general, I notice that the Asian diaspora in Canada tend to have stronger ties with their motherland for some reason, and there are many people from HK, TW, and others Asian countries in Ontario that would jump on this. With the shift in transborder traffic, I imagine people in Western Canada looking for a vacation may want to visit Asia more than the US as well.

I will also add there is an expectation that CI/BR will be able to add service with the new agreement to YYZ or YYC as well.

Yield isn't everything, is it? Yield would improve with lower fares. DL started selling SEA-TPE RT a few days ago for under $700 in Y:
Roundtrip Nonstop Airfare Flight on Delta Air: Seattle, WA to Taipei, Taiwan

DL will likely return to last next month cause their increase just started end of last week (although the number of seats aren't much different).

If we put yield in perspective then BR/CI are doing much better than JX/DL. CI can simply adjust cargo flights and put more in passenger belly and fly less passengers as it has quite some operation in SEA. Loadings on J have been reported to be poor on JX/SEA while DL does fill the front cabin (but we don't know if they are non-rev).

Most Taiwanese in Canada live in BC actually which is why TPE-YVR O&D is bigger and TPE-YYZ. But both markets also have huge demands to East and Southeast Asia so JX will be able to tap into that demand too from YVR.

JX doesn't need connection beyond YVR to eastern Canada to make the route work. They have O&D and they have connection to/from southeast Asia. JX has the same exact business model as BR and CI... they don't need feed from North America gateway to make the destination work otherwise they won't launch it (with possible exception of the daytime flights from SFO and LAX).

JX expected to open PHX? Not confident how real this is.

PHX is certainly a large catchment, but not very high in Asian population. Aside from TSMC ties, I don't see a big driving factor for this. JX has no feed for PHX, unless they magically join OW and get AA? Do they have something to do with Southwest?

https://www.skyharbor.com/about-phx/...light-to-asia/

Speculations:
1. They need to keep their assets (i.e. planes) busy
2. PHX is virgin territory
3. Since PHX is an AA hub, adding it gives a tiny boost to their case for joining OW

Rumor said BR did consider PHX as well, but ultimately chose DFW, so it's not out of the blue that JX selected PHX. There is cargo there (CI flown some before). I don't think BR/CI will consider PHX now cause it's not a very big market to Asia.

April 2025

Seems like DL are here to stay. Although their yields are indeed not great.

I think this is another LAX-AKL situation. Where they keep the route, but need to offer dirt cheap fares for the sake of network.

Well, I was looking at fares on behalf of my parents and DL isn't actually cheaper for cash fares in all instances, at least not from the east coast of the USA. It does have a better schedule though.

But there is surprisingly prime ticket availability on Flying Blue for the route , I guess DL is trying to fill its planes with redemptions.

Delta isn't very good at getting customers from the east coast to Seattle yet, but if you look at markets where they have nonstop service to Seattle (e.g. PDX, SLC, DEN), the fares are comparable to UA via SFO.

Meanwhile, the Taiwanese carriers aren't super competitive beyond their gateways (I.e. even though JX has the AS partnership, AS doesn't toss in SEA-PDX for next to nothing, and JX doesn't eat this cost). But, they don't really care about PDX-TPE because they can pull off routes like SEA-KUL, which neither Delta nor United can.

DL is only matching fares where UA is in direct competition via one stop (SEA/SFO). There are also not many choices from East Coast.

They also offer 195K one way in Skypesos for XXX-SEA-TPE in Busienss. Not as good as 110K as previous but definitely not the skyrocket 450-540K for other routes. In Economy there are 20-30K one way.

May 2025



Loadings are not looking good where there are competitions.

What I see from this is that SFO/LAX loads are suffering at the expense of SEA loads.