STT757 wrote:adamblang wrote:STT757 wrote:
Thanks for this!
Kirby told me that the dedicated 50-60 wide-body aircraft, which United operates on Transpacific routes, will be redeployed. “We are by far the largest US airline to Asia. Now we re-deploy many of these Pacific fleet aircraft to Europe as well domestically, as well as on newly added flights to Africa, India and the Middle East.“
Given Europe stage lengths are about 1/2 to 2/3 Asia stage lengths, that's a lot of routes!
Its domestic, Africa, India and I'm guessing Latin America. Domestically I'm speculating the 767-300s will be back on JFK-LAX/SFO.
For Europe I'm guessing ORD-Barcelona/Madrid, SFO-FCO, BCN, MAD, Lisbon, and perhaps we will finally see LAX-TLV.
All those SFO adds would be more than welcome. However, I seriously doubt UA adding much (or anything) from SFO... I don't even think it's a question of filling the planes; my question is just how much low-yielding, AA-style long-haul routes do they want?
There's not a lot they can do with those large J-cabin Asia-focused widebodies. I think we can easily rule out SFO-MAD/LIS, as even IB is not planning on flying SFO-MAD next summer so bookings may be pretty slim, and SFO-LIS wouldn't be a good one simply because it would cannibalize *A partner TAP's SFO route... and while demand from the Bay Area to Portugal is outsized (since there's more demand than people would expect), there isn't the market for more than one carrier, and TAP doesn't fly to SFO daily, not even in the summer.
SFO-FCO could be interesting as it's a relatively large unserved market. But regarding SFO-BCN, while I definitely think it could support service, UA would have to compete with LEVEL's prices on their nonstop, and it's also pretty telling that UA doesn't fly ORD-BCN yet, so there's not much reason for SFO-BCN to make an appearance in the route map yet.
I think the cornerstones of UA's TATL network from SFO this coming summer will be developing strong, (perhaps pre-COVID level?) multi-daily connections onto MUC/FRA/ZRH, as well as offering a wide range of TATL p2p such as LHR, AMS, TLV, and CDG. And if bookings are strong enough, maybe we will even see them launch SFO-DUB (launch currently scheduled for late March 2022). All in all, it should be a pretty robust schedule, even if there are no adds made to the network.