Originally Posted by
Typhoonpilot
I'll just make a comment on the first part. The other day I was looking at the best way to get from my home in the USA to Abu Dhabi, business class of course. I prefer Delta because I really like their Business Elite product, but DAL doesn't fly to Abu Dhabi. I ran a search on their website anyway and it came up with a connection in Amsterdam as the connecting possibility using KLM for the Amsterdam-Abu Dhabi leg. Round trip price was in the $7000 range. I set the search to include Dubai to pick up the DAL ATL-DXB service. I would actually prefer to do that and take a car from DXB to Abu Dhabi, but the price came back as over $10,000 round trip. No way I can justify the price differential to the travel department so I'll be stuck on a KLM A330 without lie flat seats if I choose the DAL/KLM option.
Round-a-bout way of getting to the point, but DAL's ATL-DXB service being full, especially in business, means the yields are anything but low.
It's probably such a round-about way of making a point, that it isn't really a point at all. I don't see how you can infer anything meaningful about yields from the price of a single B/E ticket search. Not to mention the fact that we can't really understand the damage being done by looking at single city-pair, which in an of itself doesn't inform us as to whether the airlines in question are, or aren't violating Open Skies agreements.
I also struggle to understand how your home is in the US, you're a pilot for Emirates, and you answer to a travel department that would allow you to pay full-fare on a competitor.