IAH-OIL-TRASH

Southwest technically doesn’t actually block seats since there’s no seat assignments. When boarding, they announce they have sold only enough tickets to enable the middle seats to remain unoccupied. They go on to say families can occupy adjacent seats. WN’s weakness is they obviously don’t board back-to-front, so there’s a lot more proximity while boarding as late boarders generally pass early boarders.

Palal

Given that ⅓ of the seats are not occupied, I can venture to guess that carry-on space is also plentiful (bags are free on WN too), so no reason to board first, really.

HeadInTheClouds

And AA is running 8x a day on the equivalent LAX-DFW on mostly 321s with a widebody thrown in here and there. And those flights are usually full too. (Not to mention 8x a day more between ONT/SNA/BUR-DFW.)

UA has woefully underestimated LA demand. I get that these were crazy times, but adjust fast.

fastair

Read this yesterday. He has a few theories in there, each of which makes some sense. The actual reasons are likely a combination of 1 or 2 of those theories. https://www.forbes.com/sites/willhor...Q#3fbdee9c2c6c

Kacee

UA's pricing and inventory management have seemed out of whack compared to other carriers since they started cutting due to COVID-19. The result . . . not only do they push customers to other airlines based on price/capacity, they antagonize a meaningful percentage of the ones who do fly with them due to packed aircraft. Brilliant management once again by UA's crack leadership team!
Don't know about you, but I'd rather walk by a seated pax through an empty aisle (WN) then be jammed three across for five hours (UA).

EWR764

To be fair, I think mainline UAL pilots have been saying that about management since about 1978 or so... and probably before that.

United's strategy has been quite conservative, but we are far from out of the woods yet. Business travel remains at near-zero levels, yields appear to be quite low and international (pax) is completely trashed.

With that said, the schedule is ramping up after Independence Day holiday. IAH-LAX, for instance, looks like it is going to 4x (3x 739 and 1x 753).

My strategy thus far has been totally airline-agnostic. If it's a nonstop, I'm on it. The incremental risk of exposure with increasing load factors is outweighed, IMO, by spending more time in overall transit. So I've found myself about evenly distributed across AA, DL, UA (sitting next to someone on each flight) now that WN has exited EWR.

JimInOhio

Something seems strangely amiss if this is UA's strategy. Assuming business travel really is mostly non-existent, who are they trying to sell to with fares well above the competition?

HNLbasedFlyer

I wouldn't make an assumption UA is actively trying to sell. The flights are full due to all the cancellations and consolidating passengers into fewer flights.

Personally, I don't think new new passengers are making that much of a difference to the bottom line.

JimInOhio

Traffic continues to grow and the 7-day average of TSA throughput compared to last year now has risen to 22.4%. Traffic (as measured by TSA throughput) has almost exactly doubled in one month. Now maybe these are mostly tickets bought long ago and moved into the future but I don't think that can account for most or maybe even much of it.

st3

We are going into the busy summer travel season so it isn't unreasonable to think these may be existing reservations. Keeping in mind that for many/most pre-COVID reservations these people didn't necessarily have the ability to cancel AND get that back in cash.

HNLbasedFlyer

Why not? June is the beginning of vacation/leisure season and many places opened, including theme parks in Florida. I'd expect family vacation tickets were indeed, bought some time ago. I'm skeptical much of that 22.4% is recent/new money.

Given the rate the States in Northeast are asking much of the US to quarantine on arrival (although more on the honor system compared to Hawaii) - it will be interesting to see the impact on traffic, the strategy by UA to add flights gradually may ultimately be the right strategy.

Kacee

Yup, the TSA Checkpoint numbers (which can be found here) are compelling. The low of 87,534 came on April 14; on June 28, TSA processed 633,810, an increase of 724%. Of course, that's still only 24% of the 2,632,030 it processed a year ago June 28.

EWR764

I think it's reasonable to call into question United's strategy here, for sure. But the approach seems to be not to fill airplanes with low-yield traffic, which would appear to comprise most of the demand in the current domestic market. UA also has a hub in the hardest-hit metro area (which is now imposing "suggested" 14-day quarantine on arrivals from some 16 states) and 3 hubs in areas with rapidly-increasing cases+hospitalizations. So, from UAL's perspective, there is still significant risk associated with firing up schedules way ahead of demand.

I don't think much, if any air travel consumer behavior during the pandemic will be predictive of what the environment will be on the other side of this thing. IMO, at this point there isn't really much to gain, and arguably still a fair bit to lose.

JimInOhio

All good points. If there is little new business travel demand (as some suggest here) and many air fares are unattractive to leisure/discretionary travelers (and certainly non-competitive) then it translates to UA simply flying around people who bought tickets long ago and deferred their travel. Maybe AA is the airline actually selling most new tickets to travelers?

UA sure looks like they are betting on another travel collapse. It's risky, IMHO, because they've already given away much of their competitive advantage... namely high frequencies in large markets. It's one thing to have hourly ORD-LGA, and EWR-LAX service, for example, but when you reduce that to a few token flights, what are you left with to make yourself look appealing?

HNLbasedFlyer

Travel has already collapsed - 22.4% of people traveling from a year ago is not a recovery. Given states rolling back reopening or pausing reopening - and newly announced quarantines, the bet seems to be a sound one.