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Old 09-08-2021 | 03:25 PM
  #82  
172skychicken
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From: 757/767
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Originally Posted by gloopy
Good points, however the LCC toe dipping into premium TA flying will very soon become a cannonball. The intent is to absolutely slaughter legacy yields on the crown jewel of revenue production. They will use superior fuel efficiency on top of undercutting what legacies have grown used to for RASM CASM and trip costs. They will absolutely blow out our margins and wipe out our yields trying to send legacy marketing departments into a retreat on their terms to keep remaining routes as profitable as has been expected. Its just a London flight. OK a couple from a couple markets. OK also Ireland. OK also Paris etc etc. If successful, other LCC's will join in and a couple years down the road the yearly seat dump on once lucrative markets, especially lay flat at a fraction of the price, will be staggering.

Its already a war of attrition. The apparent capacity-war/rational growth truce the industry had during the 2008-ish doldrums is over. Gordon Bethuns once said "you're only as smart as your dumbest competitor." Lose money fighting them now, or lose far more fighting them later. If the 321 XL-Whatever is the best weapon to fight back, great. If counter dumping with widebodies makes more sense, awesome. But it can't go unanswered and on their terms.
Jetblue is flying an A321 with 138 seats to London. 24 of those are the lie-flat mint product. They aren't going to be making any money in that configuration by trashing the yields. I think you are dramatically overestimating the CASM advantage over a 280 seat A339 or even a 240 seat 767-400. I just don't buy the A321 as a widebody killer over the Atlantic when the 757 also had a similar mission profile with similar theoretical CASM advantages over the widebodies of that generation.
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