Wow: United Airlines Hugely Scales Back Asia Flights

@paolo. that is indeed disappointing but the US per capita still has one of the lowest infection and death rates. As was stated yesterday, there is no fear for the vast majority of healthy people even if exposed to the virus. And it appears that most of the cases in the US are in the northern tier of states including N. California. @dominic yeo. Delta is the 2nd largest airline across the Pacific based on published schedules before all of the schedule reductions started. Delta has still cancelled a lower percentage of its transpacific schedule than United which was the only airline larger than Delta before the cuts started. Given that United operated duplicate flights on many of its routes, it can and likely will reduce a lot of capacity and still have an intact route system. So, no, Delta didn't dismantle its transpacific network. Delta's Detroit hub is (or was before cuts) the second largest US carrier transpacific gateway behind United at San Francisco. Delta at Seattle was number 4 behind American at DFW which even before the cuts had basically decided to reduce its Pacific network to DFW to Asia plus LAX to Tokyo. Facts are your friend - unless they highlight biases.

What about flights to Italy?

United is being very cordial here, actually. The rumor on the grapevine is that United was kicking Singapore's ass on the ULH flights. UA offers "The Private Suite" ex SIN, and it was popular with those flying United Y and wanting to splurge a bit. There remains more Singapore residents who are MileagePlus than Krisflyer. SQ does not allow points transfers for Singapore market, so KF is frigging useless. PPS Club... it's no longer easy to spend S$25,000 on FIrst and Business and Suites on SQ now.

It's great to see our peers in the West saying "yes" to the world, and desiring contact with Asia. It wasn't too long ago when you were all briefly so mean, blaming Asia for the end of the world. Even if not directly spoken, we definitely felt unwelcome. Just look at Delta. It literally dismantled its Asia network, and is reconstituting it in South America. Not because South America demand will be high. Not because LATAM is a better partner. There is a reason why Delta is engaging with so many strong foreign airlines. They want to shrink. A premium positioning airline means Delta must be picky with its hubs. Delta and Alaska actually have very unfortune brands. In Asia, Delta is associated with D-grade in academia. That's mediocrity assumed. It's not fair especially since Delta's biggest rival, has the most noble word in humanity. Alaska's Chinese name is literally a slur against Islam. I'm actually worried about SQ though. They are the most affected airline group.

@TimDunn Well, the “world’s best” system for responding to an infectious disease crisis didn’t get off to a flying start, one would have to say: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/02/united-states-badly-bungled-coronavirus-testing-things-may-soon-improve