azepine00

Overseas carriers do not serve the wide market of countless destinations in north america and most focus on covering major cities only. American carriers do buy/lease new aircraft these days but they the network they serve offers little justification for 380.

Quality of F/C in US is more aligned with general corporate business travel as wealthy individuals can afford fractional ownership of private jets with a great network in north america. Overseas the wealthy are more likely to pay for commercial C and F making the field and the product more competitive.

Maluku_Flyer

Exactly what the US carriers do in overseas destinations as well.

The multitude of secondary destinations is covered nicely by the respective alliances.

GUWonder

They have become increasingly US-centric, and are increasing service to/from the US.

The relative Euro-centrism of sorts of North American and European legacy majors is increasingly being given a run for the money by the likes of EK/EY/QR because the latter have an improving/expanding route network for traffic connecting North America with LDCs in Africa and Asia and for traffic entirely between rapidly developing countries. Better serving more rapidly growing markets probably has consequences for the industry's historical leviathans and minnows on North America-Europe routes.

The US carriers have a history of higher prices from the US to parts of India than Air India and yet have had some trouble serving India despite passengers from the US willing to pay more to avoid perceived poorer service/product.

zpaul

Just to play the Devil's Advocate, how many of those passports are used more than once? I remember reading a statistic about that years ago (in the 90s it was something like 85% of all passports were only used once during their validity) but I'm sure that number has changed.

GUWonder

That number has not only changed, it has increased tremendously. A large part of that is the result of people who are naturalized US citizens, the growing population of US persons with at least one-foreign-born parent and of the US Government's WHTI push.

That said, a lot of the US passports taken when traveling internationally by surface transport means never got stamped, so there often is no certainty about how or how often a US passport was used -- sometimes it's not even known by the person to whom it was issued.

After temporary and emergency passports, of the passport types issued to non-government persons, the Hajj type passport is the one that most probably will be used for only one international roundtrip. The Hajj passport is a passport type most commonly used by poor people from the likes of Thailand, Indonesia and India and one that is a rare sight in Europe and the Americas. Whether or not it should always be called a passport, not my issue.

NFeldberg

I stand by my statement that Americans travel less frequently over seas. An observation I made on many of the over seas flights I was on, leaving from the U.S was that Canadians seemed to be a large majority traveling on American carriers on over seas routes out of JFK, ORD and EWR. American carriers and airports have more options for over seas travel then they have in Canada. Canada also has a far better economy which allows them to spend more on vacations out of Canada. America does not.

All in all, the American airline industry does kind of suck right now, but I believe they are slowly improving. The flying public should pay more for fares, especially domestically. The bottom line is... you get what you pay for.

elCheapoDeluxe

So what you're saying is, those cheapskate Canadians are the ones buying up all those cheap seats on American carriers. We should be blaming them? :P

Also, I might add that I don't think that observation is true. Given the lines approaching immigration where it splits to US and foreign passport holders, I tend to see a majority going into the US line - with presumably many of the others coming from or transiting through whatever the foreign origin of the flight was. If *I* were Canadian, I'd avoid the US's screwed up handling of in-transit passengers like the plague.

pinniped

I would bet the house that this is not true. If even a single flight goes out of JFK with a 51% Canadian passenger load, then it's a tour group of some sorts. Forget about "large" majority and forget about this as a pattern across tens of thousands of flights.

Even if Canadians travel intercontinentally at a greater rate than Americans, there simply aren't enough of them to flood the greater Chicago and New York City areas with enough passengers to constitute a large majority of the long-haul air travel there. If this were true, JFK, ORD, and EWR would immediately replace all of their fast-food restaurants with a Tim Horton's every 15 meters.

Besides, why would huge numbers of Canadians connect through U.S. airports to go abroad? I get why some do - they found a good fare or are flying to a destination that is better served by a U.S. carrier. But it's not like Canadian airports don't have a lot of their own nonstops to Europe and Asia.

I'm not sure where you're getting that data...Canada might have a slightly rosier personal disposable income outlook right now but they're financing it with debt at a greater rate than the U.S. Their debt and housing markets look a little bit like the U.S. in 2007. Per capita GDP is still higher in the U.S. At the end of the day, the two economies are heavily linked so I don't think you can say one is vastly outperforming the other at some at extreme rate that New York's airports are overflowing with Canadians. Canada outperformed the U.S. during and after the banking crisis. The U.S. outperformed Canada in 2012.

I've always thought in my mind that Canadians traveled internationally at a greater rate than Americans. Something cultural...maybe a sense of connection to the Commonwealth...who knows what. Of course, that could be a cognitive bias since pretty much every Canadian friend I have was met while (wait for it...) he or she was traveling internationally.

We are. Airlines have finally, after about 25 years of a focus on market share and revenue growth, decided to focus on margins. Southwest drove this bus for a long time, injecting new capacity into new routes every year. Now they've matured and there is no growth-focused upstart out there fighting to get into markets with $49 seats. Demand is rising, supply is staying pretty constant. Leisure fares are getting pushed out of many markets as airlines are content to fill fewer planes with higher-paying business travelers.

If we want cheap fares again, then we need Ryanair to decide that it can take America. For that to happen, we'd need a much more moderate and stable market for crude, yet enough economic growth in the U.S. to make a new airline seem attractive. Problem is that economic growth and cheap oil don't go hand-in-hand short of a huge shift in demand away from oil and to some other form of energy. (e.g., tens of millions of electric cars)