jfk777 wrote:BarrenLucidity wrote:3D101CA wrote:Airlines have different areas of focus, it makes no sense to bash them for not flying to certain regions as much as other carriers.
AA is larger in the Caribbean, Central America, and South America compared to the other major US carriers. They just have a different area of focus. Nothing wrong with that, makes no sense to hear complaints about how they lack in Europe.
Can I complain about their lack of coverage in Asia?
United purchased Pan Am's Pacific system and added from Chicago and its massive San Francisco hub. Delta purchased Northwest, their largest international division was Asia and Japan especially. UA and DL acquired existing legacy assets in Asia as the current basis of their systems.
AA has had been building their Asian system one route at a time, largely from DFW. ORD and LAX have played large parts in AA's Asian routes, Covid killed many AA routes especially to China. Today besides LAX and DFW to Tokyo Haneda and LAX to Sydney AA has little to show for their 30 plus years of Pacific operations. AA just announced DFW to Shanghai, again, twice weekly. AA recently has expanded from JFK to Delhi and Doha. Sadly all to Chicago to Asia routes are history. AA needs to find a strategy for Asia with a solid foundation.
AA has never found much success in flying across the Pacific, beyond some very core markets, so why do they need to build more there, when it doesn't work for them?
The LAX gateway to Asia was not profitable at all, and AA has been very clear about that. LAX was, and in many ways still is, a saturated market to Asia, where yields can be challenging. AA went all in on LAX-Asia pre-COVID because it had to have something from the West Coast, and the only logical place to do it was LAX, where it has critical mass.
ORD-Asia did not work because at the time, all AA had was premium heavy 77Es (pre-reconfiguration) which weren't the right plane for the markets it was serving and AA's focus shifted further away from ORD being an intercontinental gateway for the airline in the run up to and certainly post-merger.
The future of AA's TPAC/Asia service (and for that matter, secondary TATL) rests with flying into partner hubs and leveraging the connections available through BA, IB, QR, JL, AY, and so forth.
I'd argue AA hasn't been building Asia one route at a time at all. It has simply shifted the focus to the one place it knows it can make money flying its own metal in that market, and that is DFW.