Originally Posted by jsloan

A few hundred dollars? The Polaris lounge is fine, but there's no airline lounge in the world that's worth a few hundred dollars to access. Especially for a local resident, who doesn't need to kill time during a connection. The IAH-HNL flight is a morning departure -- use the hundreds of dollars for a nice breakfast and a limo ride to the airport, and you'd still come out ahead.


Very few carriers have found international F profitable on any route, anywhere in the world. The carriers that offer it are either excluding the cabin from their newer plane orders (SQ, LH), shrinking it (SQ again), removing it entirely (UA, OZ), or have no particular need to turn a profit (EK, QR). AA's obviously an exception, but they're also a horribly mismanaged airline, so I'm not sure I'd be looking to them for guidance.

The basic problem is that the business class hard product got to be too good, so there's less of an incentive for anyone to fly F. Sure, the United First seat was better than the Polaris seat, but not so much better that people were willing to pay a significant premium.

As for trying to use it on leisure routes -- a few issues:

1. You're begging for trouble if you have too small of a subfleet equipped with F; it really limits the flexibility you have in route planning, and heaven help you if an aircraft or two are out of service. Even if there is a market for flights to OGG/HNL/PPT, that's not enough flights to make it practical.
2. You absolutely cannot judge future demand for premium leisure travel by current numbers. You're looking at a large amount of pent-up demand and a small number of available destinations. A lot of people who would otherwise have been going to Australia or Asia are going to Hawaii this summer just because it's open.
3. UA has a particularly high-density J cabin. Comparing UA, SQ, and AA's 77Ws: between doors 1 and 2, AA and SQ both have 8 F and 8 J seats. UA has 28 J seats. So, you're looking at replacing 20 J seats with 8 F seats, meaning that just to break even, you're going to need fares that are 2.5x the average J fare. Just because UA can sell 60 seats at $2K doesn't mean that they can sell 8 seats at $5K and 40 seats at $2K.
4. UA's soft product is not up to international F standards, and there's no particular reason to believe that it could be. If you search the archives, you'll find plenty of derisive posts about the soup -- which was the only difference between the F and J offerings when UA still had F.
5. Pre-COVID, there were already complaints about the Polaris lounges being too crowded during peak departure windows. (And there's no Polaris Lounge in HNL, OGG, or PPT anyway).

I suspect you're judging the market by your own preferences, but given your first comment above, I'm not convinced that you're representative of their customer base.

Originally Posted by Unitedloyalflyer

.....
given that there are very few markets where int'l first would work (in addition to the 3 I named, maybe you could justify it to Bali or BKK, but we don't fly to BKK),
....

Originally Posted by EmailKid

Ha, ha, there was a rather long thread about why UA pulled out of BKK (to the displeasure of many of us here), and I think the consensus (with some strong disagreement among the minority) was that it was a leisure market, and even many other airlines scaled back or cut back on premium seats.

There is NO WAY that UA would even THINK about flying Int'l FC to BKK



OK, flying, not parking ....

Originally Posted by Unitedloyalflyer

IFC does not seem to be a business travelers product. It is primarily a leisure product for the ultra wealthy as next to no companies pay for F (basically, it's competition against flying private)
......

Originally Posted by Weatherboy

Back in the pre-COVID days at a GS soiree held in the SFO Polaris Lounge, a senior UA person told me they were looking at the likelihood of creating a Polaris or Polaris "light" offering into Hawaii, complete with some kind of Polaris/Polaris light lounge in HNL. He wouldn't elaborate on what exactly "light" was , although I asked if that could be a lounge within a lounge for Polaris/GS people to which he nodded.

While in normal times ANA had their A380s coming into their beautiful HNL lounge, which includes their own F area within the lounge, I wonder how that lounge offering performs for ANA and *A. Would be interesting if UA made that some kind of Polaris thing, and shuttle passengers to the UA gates via ramp sedan.

Before the pandemic, Australia/New Zealand-Hawaii traffic was also picking up. Would love to see UA bring back HNL-SYD, and would be nice to see such a route Polarized. But I think thats a pipedream. Then again, 18 months ago, I never would have believed UA would bring 3-cabin aircraft to KOA yet here we are.

Originally Posted by Weatherboy

Before the pandemic, Australia/New Zealand-Hawaii traffic was also picking up. Would love to see UA bring back HNL-SYD, and would be nice to see such a route Polarized. But I think thats a pipedream. Then again, 18 months ago, I never would have believed UA would bring 3-cabin aircraft to KOA yet here we are.

Originally Posted by N104UA

I would see UA entering into a stronger partnership with HA before they start their own HNL-SYD route.

Originally Posted by N104UA

I would see UA entering into a stronger partnership with HA before they start their own HNL-SYD route.

Originally Posted by Weatherboy

I think WN will buy HA before that would happen.

Originally Posted by Unitedloyalflyer

Didn't there used to be a BusinessFirst light offering into Hawaii before $misek downgraded it?

Originally Posted by Weatherboy

CO offered full BusinessFirst experience on their EWR-HNL route complete with lounge access on either end. I think IAD-HNL was also the same. Back in the days when the CO lounge was inside the terminal and overflowing with mai tais and Milanos.

Originally Posted by cesco.g

Referring to CO, maybe IAH-HNL?