Quote:
Originally Posted by locolife
Gotcha, that is a total pain. I have good luck with One World options out of PHX not that I travel international a ton but have always been able to find decent connections for travel to Asia and the Middle East. South America options from the Southwest US are pretty annoying right now, you almost always end up going all the way to Miami or Dallas to head basically due South. I was surprised that even LAX had very little One World options to SA.
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AA's entire strategy the last 10 years has been to throw shit at the wall and see what sticks.
-They have failed to make a push to defend their territory in their major hubs. They have ceded major ground at ORD to United, LAX to UA and DL, PHX to WN, JFK/PHL to DL and UA, and even MIA to Spirit.
-They tried to utilize PHL as their primary Atlantic gateway thinking that they'd still be able to compete with UA and DL New York area hubs with a handful of additional routes from JFK. But PHL just doesn't have the same O/D demand that makes such a wide variety of destinations possible the way that DL has at JFK, and even more so UA has at EWR. When that failed, both JFK and PHL suffered route cuts. Spitting the destinations between the two airports means splitting the connecting network to support those flights between the two airports as well, and AA just don't have the robust network to support both.
-They enter new markets to try and compete with DL and UA, but don't seem to ever stay in the market long enough to allow the market to develop.
-They lack a strong Pacific gateway hub, especially since they ceded so much ground at LAX, which is already a difficult airport to compete in because of the saturation from international carriers.
-They attempted to utilize SEA as a transpacific gateway, announcing flights to LHR, PVG, and Bangalore (again...seemingly just to try and compete against the announced UA flights without any data to support the success of the flight), despite not having a large enough operation in SEA to connect enough passengers to fill the planes, and only offering flights to their own hubs. Instead, they tried to partner with Alaska to offer codeshares to fill the planes, meaning the profit of those already extremely expensive routes would have to be split with Alaska. Also seemingly ignoring the fact that DL has been trying to grow its trans-pacific presence in SEA for a long time and struggling because SEA just isn't a convenient hub for connections from most of the United States, and insufficient O/D demand to help support their flights, let alone a second major carrier.
-When their PHL/JFK/LGA strategy wasn't working, they partnered with JetBlue to try and skip the whole growth stage as well, full-well knowing it didn't have a chance in hell of surviving anti-trust scrutiny.
They're messy. They really don't have much of a strategy and it's painfully obvious.