I was going through US Airways’ second quarter release and found this:
Relative to other U.S. legacy or big six hub and spoke carriers, our larger domestic presence means our revenues are less adversely affected by the global economic downturn.
This got me thinking to see how exposed some carriers are to international service, so I decided to divide international mainline ASMs by total mainline ASMs.
Unfortunately, the regionals screw up this comparison a bit because I can’t include them. US Airways only reports traffic for PSA and Piedmont, the two carriers it owns, and only Delta reports how much international service is provided by regional carriers. So, I could add in Continental’s regional ASMs into domestic, but that would include all of ExpressJet’s flying to Mexico.
Anyway, here’s what I found. This is data for the second quarter of this year. I found it pretty interesting that more than half of Continental’s ASMs are for international service!
Click to enlarge.
The carriers also report international traffic by region (Atlantic, Latin, and Pacifc), so I divided those numbers by total international mainline ASMs:
Three carriers – Delta, US Airways, and Continental have most of their international capacity in transatlantic markets, American has the most in Latin America, while United has most of its international ASMs in the Pacific.
The excessive focus on US carriers on the relatively lower income trans-atlantic routes while ignoring the far more profitable trans-pacific routes come to the fore.
This has been the case well before the slowdown which is only magnified now.
No wonder service levels and cabin products of US carriers keep dropping. It is little wonder why the airlines of the nation which led the globe in to the world of air travel does not feature in any truly global measurement of airline service excellence anymore.