Creating the largest airline in the world.
We’ve reached the moment of 3 “legacy” carriers - American, United, & Delta. Down from United, Delta, American, Northwest, Continental, and USAirways.
Who’s excited for higher prices?
Vomit…but really AA had no other play at this point. No other dance partners.
sigh ah well. My traveling days have ramped down so I’ll be a lowly Gold on AA down from my years of Exec. Plat. I guess I’ll burn my miles in one around the world Oneworld first class itinerary.
Pretty much +1.
I have roughly 70,000 butt in seat miles for lifetime Gold. I’d like to go ahead and get that before they shut that spigot off. I’m not traveling like I used to so that would be nice to have in the bank as a backup option when not flying other carriers.
This is going to suck. Besides the integration issues, which will be a PITA for everyone (ask Dan Hammer about how the COdbaUA merger has gone), we’ll get higher fares and worse service. A dilution of elite benefits is also depressingly likely.
Scott Parker/US massively overpaid. The whole point of AA’s BK was to reduce labor costs, but in order to get union support for the merger Parker promised the unions significantly higher pay than what AA was able to negotiate in BK. Adding US’s lower revenue route structure won’t help either.
It’s a shame that Parker and the rest of the America West management team will get the opportunity to destroy another airline.
The only good airlines now are overseas, or the smaller ones like JetBlue/Virgin America/Southwest (but the latter is getting bigger, with the sort-of acquisition of Airtran)
Southwest is in a different business from the others.
Will be interesting to see how this plays out in the Northeast. Lots of route-map-overlap in the NYC/DC/BOS markets that’ll be eliminated…errr, I mean “improved”.
Oooooh - more Parker bashing ![[wow.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/7/7d450e9830889c8943b674446a21b7254cad657e.gif "wow"){kind=small}
Actually not so much. One of AA’s competitive disadvantages has been its poor market position in BOS and @JFK, and their presence in DC is minuscule compared to US’s. In fact, I’d say that market penetration in the NE is probably the single biggest strategic value in the transaction from the AA side.
Not that that this is inside info.
The biggest strategic opportunity in the Northeast (for either carrier) is to, essentially, cut lift between cities like BOS-DCA, BOS-LGA/JFK, LGA-DCA thus raising prices. AA and US operate shuttle flights between those city pairs close to every 60-90 minutes. The new American won’t keep that frequency…most likely, they’ll end up with hourly flight options, reducing lift by ~50% and raising prices.
These are highly prized routes with low price sensitivity due to the amount of business travelers.
Thinking about this more, I think a lot of the TransAtlantic traffic that US has via CLT and PHL will be moved to JFK. Plus, I think PHL stands to lose a good deal of lift as international passengers will be moved to JFK.
AA has no DC-NY shuttle, and its operations are extremely thin. The shuttle was a primary “get” for AA in the NE. I don’t expect to see much pressure on prices along that corridor.
I heard this am on the news that there was AA/US overlap on 12 of 900 city-pairs. That sounded low to me but not by orders of magnitude. It will be interesting to see how they accommodate both the modest US transatlantic traffic out of Philadelphia and the improved gate access in NYC for transatlantic AA flights.
This is unlikely, because JFK is slot-controlled, especially at peak times for TATL routes (i.e. evenings). It’s impossible to expand there. AA also doesn’t have much purely domestic connecting traffic at JFK that could be moved to PHL to open up slots – almost all of their JFK traffic is either O/D or international connections.
AA desparately needed a greater East Coast presence. When we lived in Dallas, my husband and I were both Exex Plats – now lifetime Plats. When we moved back to the East Coast, we both switched to United. It’s been nice to have option of UA or US for Star Alliance points/miles.
But at least we have some options again with AA depending on what they do with the CLT, PHL, and PHX hubs. AA’s current hubs (SFO, LAX, DFW, ORD, MIA, LGA, DCA, BOS, STL (closing?). Generally loved flying AA from Dallas. Hope the new AA keeps more Boeing jets – I’m not a big fan of flying Airbus.
STL was closing before the merger