its fares and loads of course, combined with costs. But it’s conceivable that TGs lower cost labor makes it profitable for them to fly a given route to the US, while UAs cost basis isnt profitable. Or at least as profitable as whatever the goal might be. Or as profitable as another route that they can use the aircraft for.

Comparing SK and LXs ability to serve BKK and UAs is just plain silly. Demand from different places, much less continents, and with completely diffeeent populations means it’s like comparing apples and oranges.

Despite never serving it non-stop, you can trust UA has plenty of data. Both external such as the amount t of people flying North America to BKK, and internal, such as how many people were searching, where they are leaving from and trends on how much people were willing to pay or not based on booking data. Combined, they can model whether the route makes sense, what kind of fares they can expect to get, the optimal amount of flights, etc. plus, how much traffic might be Business vs. leisure. I wouldn’t call it a lousy routing, though certainly not ideal compared to a nonstop. It did allow for convenient connections from all UA hubs though, something that launching a nonstop from SFO won’t necessarily do, since it’s more efficient from pretty much anywhere outside of California - certainly from UAs hubs, to fly via NRT than via SFO.

Who was going NYC-SFO-BKK? Except for folks on the west coast, practically anyone else would be flying [insert other UA hub name]-NRT-BKK.

You wouldn’t. Unless maybe leisure folks and there was a huge discount for doing that routing. One of the advantages for UA of running the BKK flight from NRT was they could use the hub model to fly everyone to NRT, then combine the BKK connectors onto a single flight from there.

UA analyzes the optimal times for its departures and arrivals with lots of factors, including for connections (in this case, both on the US and NRT ends), available slots, aircraft utilization, and a host of whole other factors that probably many don’t even think of. They don’t just throw a dart at the board to come up with departure times. OALs do the same kind of optimization on their end, though if you are referring to Asia-based OALs, their networks and flight patterns are completely different than ones from North America, which is likely most of the discrepancy in times.

As For wages, TGs wages (or really, overall costs) don’t determine whether it’s relevant, as you say, or profitable, in reality, for UA to fly to BKK. However, it could make the difference for it to be profitable for TG but not for UA, based on the potential market dynamics (as mentioned before, fares, loads, yields, etc). But as well, any potential TG entry to the market, regardless of the costs, will affect the fares that UA may be able to get on this route. If UA has a monopoly on the non-stop, they can likely charge higher fares than if someone else is flying it also, particularly a carrier with lower costs who presumably has more flexibility to lower fares that they would have to compete with. Maybe UA could make it profitable if they know they are flying the route exclusively, but is afraid of TG starting up, forcing them to lower any fares at a loss for them.

Of course, there may be a better way. Given both are in *A, it might be worth exploring getting TG into the *A TPAC JV, and where they might be able to jointly operate a flight. I’m pretty sure TG and NH already codeshare with each other (though not sure if they have a JV), so maybe it’s possible, and might be the best of both worlds. Allows a single flight with single costs to be shared, presumably higher fares since they aren’t ‘competing’ and a nonstop option for all.