craz

Well that 738 is back to a 747 , and when I was on it it was Empty. So as much as we like the 747 over the 738, unless they are selling tkts on that route CO was probably correct in using the 738, since if most folks are simply as I did using it as a way to get a HKG & SIN stops onto 1 tkt for the price of a HKG tkt , it doesnt make any sense to me

Any carrier has to do what will increase its bottom line and not what will be a better flight for its Elites

geofflaredo

I was on this roundtrip in February. Totally full in both directions, available every day. must be seasonal; i'm looking at jan and Feb 2014 and the flight is there

+1. And why would DC-area folks go to Hawaii? Well, it's lovely, and it's far. This is flyertalk - it's approx 10K miles for that itin!

LASUA1K

They drove all the business away! I was on that route frequently in the past, and it was full in all cabins.

hobo13

Interesting how you so emphatically assume that these are mutually exclusive.

craz

Full of HKG-SIN-HKG passengers who purchased that tkt, or add ons like I was. By adding SIN onto my HKG tkt it was all of $40 more! So if CO checked and saw basically all they were doing is ferrying those who were flying US-HKG onto SIN then they were correct for using the 738

The problem is we dont have a way to know how many HKG-SIN-HKG tkts they were selling

OT but CO for yrs Refused to put E+ onto their planes saying it was throwing $$ out the window.Once they were able to look at UAs books they learnt very fast how Wrong they were.

Point is I dont blame whoever made the decission to use the 738.They knew the #s and felt it ws the correct decission , OK in the end it seems it wasnt, but none of us were against the 738 since it was better profit wise we just didnt want a narrow-body for that length of a flight. Do you know anyone that prefers an RJ over a mainliner I dont. Yet many routes have been downgraded to an RJ.

Really OT but both LH and BA Downgraded their widebodys to Only A-320 series to TLV. Everyone yelled they wont fly BA or LH any longer yet it seems they are still filling their planes on that route. My pt is ALL carriers are trying to utilize their fleet to the max that they can. Could be BA/LH felt they would maintain their full fare passengers and all theyd lose would be the lesiure traveler who really didnt trickle much to the bottom line anyway. Wouldnt surprise me if CO was thinking along those same lines, Except it seems it didnt pan out as they had hoped it would.

Has CO lost its LAX/SFO - HI biz, after all its now mainly 738,753 seems no they havent at least from the times I flew it or was looking to fly to HI.Which probably will end up giving them more to their bottom line. CO wont be right all the time and they know that, so what should they do listen to us who Only want planes with F & C no Y and all bed-seats at the price of a G fare, or to play with the planes and routes and try to squeeze what they can out of each route

As an Elite passenger I want widebodys with bed-seats for the price of a G fare or a W and being able to confirm an UP then and there. If I was running UA Id want the opposite and not fill up my Premium cabins with ElCheapo tkt passengers and thusly not beable maybe to sell that seat to someone for alot more $$$. I dont know of any shareholder that will say Jeff should go back to PMUAs ways of leaving the barn door open and giving everything away for $0 or close to that

raehl311

Hawaii is in the US and the Caribbean isn't. That gets you a much better tax treatment on "business" trips (cough conferences cough vacations) to Hawaii.

craz

In most cases I believe they are

hobo13

So what is good for elites is not good for profits?

In that case, why even have a frequent flyer program?

Just tell those GS'es to 'get outta here. You're a drain on profits!'

wwu123

Interesting how you so emphatically assume that these are mutually exclusive. Sorry, couldn't resist.

In all fairness I think many folks want to visit different warm weather vacation spots in different years, ranging from Hawaii to Mexico to the Caribbean. That's certainly true of my friends in D.C., granted they go to Hawaii much more rarely than to the Caribbean because of distance and budget.

BTW, Hawaii tourism and visitor counts have recovered back to pre-crisis record levels, and apparently people from both coasts do want to go to Hawaii. Here are the visitor counts from West Coast and East Coast and elsewhere:

CATEGORY AND MMA Dec 2012 Dec 2011 % change YTD 2012 YTD 2011 % change
VISITOR ARRIVALS 733,709 690,090 6.3 7,998,815 7,299,048 9.6
Total by air 724,163 670,116 8.1 7,837,194 7,174,397 9.2
U.S. West 289,301 265,853 8.8 3,194,975 2,994,731 6.7
U.S. East 149,403 144,187 3.6 1,699,124 1,642,279 3.5
Japan 120,116 114,001 5.4 1,452,563 1,241,805 17.0
Canada 66,897 65,445 2.2 498,241 477,564 4.3
All Others 98,446 80,630 22.1 992,291 818,018 21.3
Visitor arrivals by cruise ships 9,546 19,974 -52.2 161,621 124,651 29.7

WineCountryUA

Using the code, /code tags improves the readability of tables

buckeyefanflyer

EWR-HNL probably gets much more local passengers from the NYC market and IAD would depend more on those connecting and one issue is many have to fly a backwards or non direct routing to take this flight. ORD and IAH also DEN, LAX, and SFO are better alternatives.

halls120

people in DC are smarter.

Yep, that's why there are so many flights every winter from the DC area to the Caribbean.

Thank you for stating the obvious.

I've lived in the DC area for 21 years now. We've been to Hawaii twice in those 21 years. We've been to the Caribbean 7 times.

Don't get me wrong, we love Hawaii. But you don't decide to pop out to Hawaii for a four day weekend. You do in the Caribbean.

spin88

I think this is the sort of short sighted view that CO managment takes, looking at each leg and saying "hey, these folks have to fly us, after all we are special..." Well, there is a lot of traffic from the US to Singapore. And nearly all traffic changes planes going to SIN, and most of it changes planes in HKG as the flight times work best. And a lot of that traffic is PAID F/C, either on corporate accounts or just people buying tickets. UA has showers and a IFL at HKG, why???? Its because they get connecting passengers to SIN and BKK.

Those folks who are paying 6-12K for their tickets suddenly found themselves ending up on a CO 738, and amazingly did not ever want to fly UA again.

revenue just dropped off the map, and not just on the HKG-SIN, but more importantly on the USA-HKG routes.

Decision was reversed, but the damage was done. Many of those folks are now flying on SQ or CX.

Yup. The flight made sense because of who was in F/C, and that it is expensive to overnight an aircraft at HKG.

Overall COdbaUA is doing very very poorly in revenue performance. They are down 4-5% month after month to AA/DL in PRASM (and in yeild). This is about $450M in revenue lost per quarter, so evidently lots of folks don't like flying on the barbie-jets or the 737 for all of their flights.

And I'm not sure that the TLV flights are comparable, there are lots of low cost airlines that serve the markets, its mostly low paying passengers, and its only like 2100 miles from TLV to FRA.

787fan

Nooooo .... I depend on those loss leaders to requal 1K with little or nearly no money

craz

The program is there just to sucker us in. The Genie is already out of the bottle and they wont beable to put it back in = dump the program.So they will do the next best thing tighten it up so that those with the Spend will get teh beenies and those w/o wont get what they were to till now (which the Hotel programs with their recent devaluations is basically doing)

In our case a GS will simply book SQ for the HKG-SIN flight and still be in C or F.Its those on the ElCheapos that will suffer (and that includes Me)

Sorry but excluding the GSs and x # of 1Ks most of us are in fact OverEntitled Elites