If you start adding up travel and hotels/per diem in the DC area along with flight loss pay across all the man hours that would be involved in hammering an agreement out, it’s probably not.

Let’s say you’ve got a team of 10 that goes up to Herndon for 2 weeks. GSA per diem is $110/night for hotels and $68/day for meals incidentals. Oh, by the way, government travelers struggle to find hotels for that cost. So let’s say at least $200/night.

Lodging: 200x10x14 = $28,000

M&IE: 68x10x14 = $9,520

2 rental minivans @ 350/wk is easily $1000 after tolls and fuel.

Flight Loss pay…don’t know the formula here but if I take a swag and say an FO is worth $20k/month and a CA is $30k split evenly between seats across half a bid month?

$125,000. So $165k total roughly? And the travel wasn’t really even the expensive part. That’s before you get lawyers and outside consultants involved. Or the full time pilots that will be working on this in DFW, though to be fair there’s probably a lot of overlap with the travelers above. Plus presumably there’s multiple rounds of polling, roadshows if a deal is hammered out, etc.

Anyway, three million ain’t what it used to be.

Guessing APA BOD figures that there won’t be much appetite for millions more and if a great deal doesn’t get worked out, the cost will be enough to put the merger talk to bed.