Always Flyin

You seem to be missing (ignoring) the bigger picture, which I laid out in my posts.

jackadler1966

What bigger picture ? 3-class F on 2 routes is a justification for picking AA, regardless of every other evidence that AA is smallest by seats, by frequencies, and by destinations out of New York ?

AA also has the fewest total seats on both JFK-SFO and NYC-SFO. Does that not matter to you ? Or does only LAX matter because AA wins there ?

NYC-SFO
UA 22x daily
AA 5x daily

Always Flyin

You may wish to go back to my original assertion to which you were responding, which to refresh your memory was: my prediction that UA will pull out of JFK within the next three years.

jackadler1966

Sure we'll hold you to it. On another thread you also predicted UA's 77W won't have all aisle access J. Let's see how many of them would come true.

I'll leave UA if both of your predictions come true.

keitherson

Not everyone flies without a soul. Without your spend and GS status, I wonder how bad your experiences with UA need to get before you ditch them. I don't care about "perks", I care about an airline that has good customer service and good on-time reliability. By both these metrics, UA lags behind the competition.

But like I said earlier, you seem to only care about getting from Point A to Point B, no matter how bad it gets. Might as well fly Southwest then.

LarkSFO

[Unduly personalized text edited by Moderator.]

I am very glad you have a soul, and that your soul is happily flying on airlines other than UA!

LaserSailor

I flew WN two weeks ago. They were 200 USD more than UA, but the schedule was direct and let me do a day work, and come home late with no hotel stay.

Ben E King has soul. No airline does. Stand by....Me.

gaobest

I've booked my SFO/ogg flight for February with HA F, which was actually cheaper than ual f (and VX F, which is only an evening/red-eye return). I've done ual F twice within the past 5 years, so I'm excited to compare ha f to my memories of ual F.

I still accumulate ual miles with Chase because I'm not sure what else to do, and I haven't had time to compare miles vs 1% cash options.

My only ual flight this year is for a 2-day wedding trip for my wife and me, where I used 40% of my miles (total 200,000, maybe half from restaurants/grocery & past ual spend) to save (avoid spending) $2,000.00 cash, since I wanted us to sit in F and I already had a lot of miles, and VX didn't have the route.

So I've not truly left United, but I'm loving the SFO / ord VX experiences more than ual at these airports.

spin88

pmUA consistently said that PS was profitable, CO killed off F, and in the face of DL adding lie flat product and VX adding service (with better soft product, but not lie flat), and now "mint" in the market, and AA revamping its fleet, when Jeff was asked on the 1Q 2015 call about JFK he refused to comment. From a strength to refuse to comment, says that you are probably making a prediction that has a high chance of being correct.

What I don't know is if PS's margins have been killed off by (1) UAL's poor soft product and CS, (2) some traffic that is tied to UA going to EWR, or (3) better competition in NYC, but something certainly is happening.

I think this is a common view of those who are not tied to UA, and that the best defense is "you should wear a hair-shirt like me" says a lot.

People keep coming on this thread and posting this exact situation. They are elite on UA, but have tried other airlines and found the experience better, and are now flying UA less or very little. Jeff's view that SFO was a fortress hub has turned out to be very very wrong.

Always Flyin

Just for those who don't know, AA has placed a fleet of brand new, 3-class, A321s on the JFK-SFO/LAX routes. They are assigned to all of the flights (and there is something like 14 a day between JFK and LAX). The F seats are 1-1 and are derivative of the AA 77W international business class seats. The C seats are the same as UA's. Y is about the same with AA's equivalent of E+.

I agree with you.

IAH is the ultimate fortress hub. There is a good sized population base, no others major airports in the area, and little competition.

EWR has little competition, but there are other major airports in the area (LGA, JFK and PHL).

SFO has significant competition and I don't see it as a fortress hub at all.

channa

Or a combination of the above, plus the overall poor UA product.

Also if you look at the ramp up of the DL JFK and LGA hubs, it's also possible that DL has taken on some of the NYC business which may have been formerly UA's (and CO's), not to mention post-merger UA's shrinkage in LAX.

Customers who fly (flew) PS likely fly other routes as well, and they may have switched carriers altogether. I would not be surprised if UA's PS performance mirrors UA's overall performance with respect to its competitors.

spin88

Delta has repeatedly cited strength and market share gain amongst "corporate sales" in NYC and LAX. At LAX it has clearly come in large part from UA, its harder for me to say re NYC. As I have noted several times, since Jeff took over United's revenue has stagnated.

United had $8608M in operating revenue in 1Q 2015, in the same quarter in 2011 (before jeff put his plan into place) United had $8202M in operating revenue. that is 4.95% growth in operating revenue (I used the broadest measure as it included "other revenue" such as TODs, etc)

Delta, well it had $9388M in operating income in 1Q 2015 and it had $7747M in 1Q 2011. So DAL's operating income grew by 21.15%.

Delta went from having much smaller to having much larger operating income. Had UAL had Delta's growth in revenue it would have had another $1.331B in income in 1Q 2015. So the passengers are clearly going to DAL, and many of them are from UAL, whether they are from NYC is another question I can't answer.

channa

Indeed. I just flew DL today on a route that UA also flies nonstop. Flight arrived early, the DL FA's did two (2) more drink runs than my sCO FA's did on an hour longer flight a week ago. I never once heard the call button go off (my last 2 sCO flights had the CO button rung at least a half dozen times each), and I wasn't obsessively checking the app for hours before heading to the airport wondering if the posted "ON TIME" status is realistic. Overall, it's a much less stressful experience than UA.

And it took DL a whopping 22 minutes to deliver my bag to the carousel, and for that they will compensate me with miles. That works for me.

sinoflyer

Here are some 4Q 2014 stats as they pertain to California-JFK markets. Rankings are based on traffic (pax count) market share.

LAX-JFK (Average Fare / Load Factor* / Market Share*)
DL $323.25 / 87.3% / 27.7%
AA $521.46 / 87.8% / 23.1%
B6 $311.49 / 71.9% / 15.9%
UA $363.04 / 90.1% / 14.5%
VX $321.62 / 89.4% / 14.0%

SFO-JFK (Avg fare/ LF* / Mkt Share*)
DL $321.83 / 90.1% / 27.9%
UA $418.16 / 91.1% / 27.8%
VX $325.08 / 92.2% / 18.4%
AA $513.64 / 91.7% / 13.8%
B6 $295.68 / 87.5% / 12.0%

Source: USDOT
* LF and mkt share figures are based on Oct 2014 only, the latest monthly data available

Some of my observations:
** DL now carries the most traffic in both California-JFK markets (at least in October 2014). Do people still think that AA is the largest carrier in LAX-JFK?

** AA has the highest average fares in both markets; UA is #2 in both markets. This has been consistent quarter after quarter for many years. DL's low average fares are caused in large by its added capacity.

** B6's average fares might be deceiving -- they are actually a very good improvement over the past quarters, and an indication that Mint is paying off, particularly LAX-JFK.

** UA's average fares in both markets have indeed been deteriorating, and its "premium" vis-a-vis competitors has also narrowed, especially in LAX-JFK.

** UA's market shares have also declined tremendously in both markets. IIRC, during PMUA days, UA had ~30% share (versus 14.5% now) in LAX-JFK and ~45% (versus 27.8%) in SFO-JFK.

** We can speculate where all the people who left UA have gone to, but I'll just go by these numbers and say that UA has definitely lost the edge. Given the competition, it's going to be tough for UA to win them back.

** Has UA mismanaged the "ps" brand? YES.

HNLbasedFlyer

Looks like Delta has to practically beg people to fly them with such low fares - I'm sure market analysts would much rather have higher fares and a lower market share than having to discount so much.