3 ms·

But clearly there is a large market for direct flights from the Bay Area to Chicago, NYC, etc. If people trying to book such a flight always chose to fly VA and

by jvm 14y ago

But clearly there is a large market for direct flights from the Bay Area to Chicago, NYC, etc. If people trying to book such a flight always chose to fly VA and pay extra to do so, there wouldn't be a problem. But they don't so there is.

potatolicious 14y ago
Sort of, not really. The problem with flying is that it's a complex function that doesn't scale easily. Even if we assume there was a large enough number of people just flying, say, SFO-JFK to support a new entrant to the route, there is a minimum volume the airline must fly to remain competitive. After all, no one is particularly interested in a SFO-JFK route that offers only 2 departures a day. And guess how you dramatically increase occupancy on your main routes? With feeder regional flights. A flight from a small city to a large airport, connect to another large airport, connect to another small city. A much larger percentage of all flights in the US are of this nature than most people know. The market for SFO-JFK only is not nearly as large as the market for XXX-SFO-JFK-YYY, not even close, and the legacy airlines, by offering regional short-hauls, stand to improve to the quality of their longer hauls by being able to do things like increase airplane size (therefore flight experience) and frequency. There is a lot more to succeeding as an airline than offering the in-flight experience people are willing to pay for.
johnrgrace 14y ago
Actually they don't Fly to Chicago, I looked it up because I am someone who's willing to pay moderate amounts of money for a better flight. I'm not paying $2k extra for first class ORD/SFO but I'll do $200 in a minute. I think their problem is they don't offer enough choices to be a regular "goto" place to buy tickets so they slide out of peoples minds.

3 ms·

But clearly there is a large market for direct flights from the Bay Area to Chicago, NYC, etc. If people trying to book such a flight always chose to fly VA and

by jvm 14y ago

potatolicious 14y ago
Sort of, not really. The problem with flying is that it's a complex function that doesn't scale easily. Even if we assume there was a large enough number of people just flying, say, SFO-JFK to support a new entrant to the route, there is a minimum volume the airline must fly to remain competitive. After all, no one is particularly interested in a SFO-JFK route that offers only 2 departures a day. And guess how you dramatically increase occupancy on your main routes? With feeder regional flights. A flight from a small city to a large airport, connect to another large airport, connect to another small city. A much larger percentage of all flights in the US are of this nature than most people know. The market for SFO-JFK only is not nearly as large as the market for XXX-SFO-JFK-YYY, not even close, and the legacy airlines, by offering regional short-hauls, stand to improve to the quality of their longer hauls by being able to do things like increase airplane size (therefore flight experience) and frequency. There is a lot more to succeeding as an airline than offering the in-flight experience people are willing to pay for.
johnrgrace 14y ago
Actually they don't Fly to Chicago, I looked it up because I am someone who's willing to pay moderate amounts of money for a better flight. I'm not paying $2k extra for first class ORD/SFO but I'll do $200 in a minute. I think their problem is they don't offer enough choices to be a regular "goto" place to buy tickets so they slide out of peoples minds.