Airline News
AA pleased with HK performance, eyes China growth
June 29th 2015
At an exclusive media gathering in Hong Kong last week, American Airlines chairman and chief executive, Doug Parker, Read More » told This Week in Asia-Pacific Aviation his carrier was “very satisfied” with the performance of its daily Hong Kong-Dallas route. Now in service for a year, Parker said the premium cabins were “consistently booked” with a load factor exceeding 80%, as he pointed out that Hong Kong was one of the few markets in the world able to support a first class cabin (mostly filled with corporate clients). Kurt Stache, AA’s senior vice-president for international strategic alliances, told us that approximately 30% of AA’s HKG-DFW passengers connected from Cathay Pacific Airways/Dragonair services.
Meanwhile, AA boss Parker was upbeat about the carrier’s outlook in the Asia-Pacific following key expansions in Mainland China, as well as a new Sydney-LAX route and the addition later this year of a Haneda-LAX service, after the U.S. Department of Transportation finally ordered Delta Air Lines to drop the route from October 1 after it found the Atlanta-headquartered carrier underutilized its traffic rights by not operating a daily service.
When asked about the open skies dispute with the Gulf carriers, Parker was quick to frame it as a matter between governments rather than airline chiefs. “We are as pro open skies as anyone else, indeed so much of what I talk about with the success of AA is due to open skies agreements. But those agreements also provide for – when the playing field is so tilted, as it appears to be with what’s going on with the governments in the UAE and Qatar – to ask for consultations. So it’s now a foreign policy issue rather than an airline versus airline issue,” Parker offered, adding India was “a prime example of where the subsidisation of the Gulf carriers has already hurt US carriers” and as such AA had no plans to return to India in the near future “because [it] can’t do it profitably against a subsidised service”.
With six daily flights to three Chinese cities now in place, AA’s capacity to China for the first time surpasses that for Japan, traditionally its most important market in Asia, echoing similar shifts observed at Delta and United Airlines. Commenting on the Mainland carriers’ aggressive transpacific expansion, Parker said he was not “particularly alarmed” and “[didn’t] know” if the Chinese were subsidized.
On another note, when asked about a replacement for the B757 on transatlantic services, Kurt Stache told This Week in Asia-Pacific there was no rush as the “757s could stay another 5-8 years”.
